I recently had a birthday, a landmark one, the kind with a zero in it. DH likes to buy me toys, and this one is special. A really landmark toy. A Strauch finest double wide motorized drum carder (whew, that’s a mouthful, too).
Just this week he gave me the perfect accessory for it. Sears.com sells a Bosch “gravity-rise wheeled table saw stand” that happens to be the perfect size for my extremely cool birthday present. This gives me some very appreciated capabilities. 1) I can use the drum carder while seated. No hunching over, reaching, wearing my back out. 2) I can move the drum carder from place to place myself. 3) Smaller footprint when folded, taking up less precious space. It’s getting crowded around here, what with all the stash and toys. I am NOT complaining about that!
The drum carder is cleverly attached to the table by heavy duty cable ties, cheap, very effective, and won’t leave any marks on the wood.
I thought it appropriate that DH should have my first handblended on the new carder (with fiber I hand dyed) and also my first handspun FO, modeled here by a young friend, not DH:
Can you see the fuzzy little bit of halo? There’s colonial top, corriedale, fawn alpaca, tussah silk and a wee bit of angora (halo). It has a nice soft hand and should be very warm.
It’s a little bit more than 4 oz. total and looked like this before carding:
and then pulled into a roving:
Here’s another batt which consists of 1) corriedale dyed in the crockpot along with 2) some tussah silk, and 3) a hint of green/blue firestar. I pulled the dyed roving apart and sorted by color, then did the three color sections separately. I think it will be a 2-ply yarn, with the colors sequential, not mixed.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. I’m still so new to all this stuff! And so obsessed. And having so much fun. I wonder if I would enjoy weaving? Would the structure of my family unit survive yet another fiber craft? I’d better not even think about it. Forget I even brought it up. No, really.