In Which the Pirate Cards.

The folks in the Combo Spin team are telling me that I should probably have a full two pounds of fibre for a sweater spinning project, and that means I’m short by four ounces. So on Sunday I got out the drum carder and came up with this batt, in shades of pink with a little bit of green/yellow (that’s showing up as gray, unfortunately) and quite a bit of white alpaca – probably why the colour got so muted. It came out to 36 grams, just over an ounce and a quarter.

It wasn’t quite what I was looking for, so I decided I would just buy another braid of fibre in the right colours. Then I tried something completely different, experimenting with feeding the fibre directly onto the drum instead of sending it through the tray, and got this orange-to-purple gradient with layers of silk between each colour. Fortunately everything went on fairly straight, because I couldn’t figure out how to send it through for a second pass and maintain the layers of colour. I also got more fibre onto the drum; this batt is 48 grams (1.7 ounces).

Next I tried a left-to-right colour blend of four… well, let’s just say they might be the most overplayed colours of the moment, at least in the realm of athletic clothing for people with female-shaped bodies. (At least it’s easy to coordinate my outfit when I go to the gym, since I can only find clothes in these colours…) I let the big drum pull the fibre slowly out of my hands again, and put layers of silk in again. Then I stripped it off the drum, tore the colours apart, and sent it all through for a second pass to get a little more blending where each colour meets the next. This one is also 48 grams (1.7 ounces); I could have gotten more fibre onto the drum if I had had more of every colour, which I didn’t. Oh well.

After that I was curious how many grams of fibre I could fit onto the drum, and succeeded in making a 50g (1.75 ounces) batt of white alpaca. I think I could probably make an even heavier batt of something that’s less floofy and more dense. I’ll have to try that next, maybe with something that’s better to photograph than a cloudy white mass.