I bought a drum carder. I also bought several little bags of pretty fibre in amounts too small to be anything on their own. An appropriate justification for both of these facts is carding different fibres together to design the composition of the yarn as well as its colour and shape.
Left to right: carded and uncarded fibres next to each other; four different uncarded fibres; carded batts; spinning in progress.
At the last minute, I decided to go to the Knitting and Stitching Showwith J, and to save myself from an unbridled orgy of stash enhancement,I set some rules. Fibre was my prime target, but only interestinghand-dyed fibre. It is of course possible to buy hand-dyed fibre on theinternet, but it’s hard to choose – so much depends on things whicharen’t obvious from a computer screen, so I much prefer to buy it inperson. The only yarn I was allowing myself to buy was sock yarn, andeven then it had to be either reduced or unavailable online.
This is my lovely new drum carder, which arrived yesterday, and which has already got through hours and hours worth of hand carding in a very short time indeed I’ve now carded all of the lilac alpaca which is destined to be my MiL’s Christmas present, and spun the first lot of it; I’m intending to spin most if not all of the rest of it this evening, and then it will be ready for washing and plying, hoorah. I’ve also made a start on carding the black alpaca, which will end up carded again, with the purple merino, to make goth-coloured yarn.
I was intending to make this into a wrap for me, and had originally thought of one of the beautiful spiky lace shawls I keep seeing on Ravelry, but in the same delivery from Fibrecrafts as the carder was another package, which I’m not entitled to enjoy for about six weeks: the loom R is giving me for my birthday. I’ve got two projects planned for this, and one of them is the gothmerino-alpaca – a nice simple rectangle of plain weaving to make the kind of wrap I like best. The other weaving project I’m planning is one I’ve already talked about: the autumn coloured wrap, with one ply of burgundy merino and one of variegated autumn-leaves colours. For a while I looked around for fibre in the colours I want, and then when I gave up on that, I looked around for undyed fibre and dyes to produce it myself, but then I remembered that Freyalynn (who dyed my Wisteria and Caribbean fibre) also does custom dye jobs, so my autumn leaves fibre has now been commissioned! This will be a birthday present from my parents. I believe in planning ahead in such matters