My friend Rochana came over on Tuesday for morning tea, we happily munched away on some really good peach muffins I made (sorry no picks, they didn’t last long enough), and then we spent the rest of the morning playing with my drum carder and coloured fleece. I have no idea what type of fleece this is but it’s so beautifully soft once it’s carded that I just love it. There is a lot more to carding fleece then I ever thought, luckily it’s great fun 🙂
 We have very little idea what we are actually doing as we were too impatient to stop and read all the instructions in the Ashford Book of Carding so we just flicked through it and started playing.
 As you can see our final result was ok, certainly not perfect, see all the little bumps in the purple…
 But it was fun.
At first I started to use this batt to spin with but with little success. I’m not really sure what the issue is, may be that I’m not feeding in enough wool but I’ve been trying to spin a thin thread but it’s not spinning as tightly as I would like and breaks easily. I’m told it’s a tension issue but I’m not having much luck fiddling so I did a youtube search hoping that there where some tutorial type videos up, to my delight I found Sue Macniven who seems to be doing a series of them for beginners. This first one is on tension.
The second one is about spinning from a prepared roving.
I’m really looking forward to seeing more from her.
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These are the results of my spinning effort, as you can see the thread is rather loose, soft and fluffy. Some sections of it twist back nicely on itself but for the most part it just isn’t holding the twist and I’m always loosing my leader because the fibers aren’t locking and just pull away from the bobbin.
Pioneering on the home front 