#fiber prep

More !!! Tour de Fleece prep ! Everything is now skirted, washed, scoured, and dry, so now I’m carding!

My drum carder is a Facebook marketplace find… it was $100, and it’s as old as dirt. It’s working just okay on these fleeces so far. I wish it had a mounted licker-in…

I bought a new set of dice at a convention the other day, and of course they needed their own little dice bag. I happened to have some fitting colors of floof in my fiber stash, so I threw them together on the blending board and dizzed them off to hopefully get a relatively smooth and blended yarn.

My first attempt at a bag was turning out too large for a single set of dice, but I luckily had spun enough that I could just start again from the other end and make a bag of the appropriate size first - and now I still have enough left over to finish the bigger bag too :) (for a later time)

I'm counting this as "make a material for your primary craft" for the @2026-fiber-arts-bingo (I'm not sure what my primary craft is these days between spinning, knitting, and crochet...)

Wool washing day was a whole afternoon affair. This is my 700 grams of merino suffolk cross from Scotts Creek Farm in NSW, Australia.

First pic is the wool in the second bath with dirt water from the initial bath in the other bucket. Next pictures are from halfway through the soap baths and the last soap bath where the water is pretty clear showing no more dirt or lanolin is being drawn from the wool.

Since I've cleared my Dorset Horn spinning, I figured it was time to start another Shave 'Em to Save 'Em project. I'd gotten a good chunk of Lincoln fleece at last year's Sheep and Wool Festival so I started washing and combing it.

I recently went on a short camping trip, and decided to take advantage of the lovely setting to film myself carding some wool. Starting much earlier in the day would have been way better, tbh -- it was starting to become Very Buggy by the time I finished.

Still, I think making more crafting videos in the woods could be fun?

First attempt!…and 2nd, 3rd 4th, and finally 5th where I finally think for the first time I’m starting to get it

Oh, this is gonna take a while, isn’t it? I should have weighed this bag before I started.

Made it to 10, and then quickly up to 23 where I had an ‘ah-ha’ moment and finally got down the motion a bit better. Still looks like I’ve done nearly nothing to the bag.

Also done today are these four batts of fibre. 80% merino, 15% corriedale, and 5% tussah silk, which makes all of these so soft it feels like you're touching air.

This is my first ever attempt at blending fibre and I'm quite happy with how it turned out. My drum carder is technically designed for medium wools but I think it managed okay with the merino and silk, I just had to go really slowly.