Of Cats and Carders

For years, I've wanted a drum carder to expand my spinning capabilities, but my budget simply would not allow for one. Having tried to use a blending board to combine recycled sari silk with wool, I discovered (painfully) that my repaired shoulder was not up to the task. I put out a plea to my friends, and very shortly received a message from one of them who had one she said she could provide me as a "long-term loan." She even delivered it to my doorstep! There was a bit of a learning curve before I realized that in order to get a decent batt, it wanted to be loaded to at least half the depth of the pins, but once I figured that out, I was ready to make my first real batt. It took five passes through the machine before I was satisfied with the distribution of silk. Pulling it off as rolags rather than a flat batt presented another complication. There was no brake for the drum other than the handle coming into contact with the table at one point in the rotation. In order to get the remaining wool off in rolags, I had to engineer a way to keep the drum from rotating when the handle came around to the 4-o'clock position. Velcro straps solved the problem. It's still a lot of work to pull the rolags off, although it's easier than trying to make them on a blending board. And yes, the Supervisor in the background is curious about mama's new toy, but the pins prickle his nose.

Footnote: over the next 24 hours, I learned a few tricks of the trade for using this device. One, a brake is not necessary if you draw rolags off in layers rather than at the full depth of the batt. It's easy to keep the drum from rolling excessively with thumb pressure. Two, when loading fiber, you should keep it thin enough to read through when you lay it on the feeder tray. I only had to put the fiber through three times before achieving the same results as I did the first time. I'm learning!