Advanced fixing of Sad Roving

A couple of days ago, I wrote this post on the HRSFAns Crafts Blog about roving that I accidentally felted, but found a way to save. It involved infinite pre-drafting, and would have to either be sold as yarn, or super-discounted bargain roving where I had the chance to instruct the person on what to do with the damn thing.

I found out two things since then:
1. The felting wasn't really my fault. Our house has 2 washing machines, and apparently they leak heat. Someone was washing a load of laundry while I was spin-cycling my roving. The heat is what did it, and not my stupidity.

2. There's a better solution for dealing with the wool. At least for me. I have a drum carder! It can deal with stuff like this. So last night I tried feeding the wool to the drum carder. I learned the hard way that you still need to pre-draft it a bit before the carder will accept the wool. However, once you do, it works really well.

So here's what you do.

1. Do some predrafting.

2. Feed the stuff into the carder. Be sure to adhere to the safety warnings it comes with. Like keeping your hands clear.



3. Once you feed it in, start cranking. The small drum will take up the stuff and put it onto the big drum.




Whee, your carder is starting to fill up. Yay!



4. Take it off the carder. You could end here, and have a batt that looks like this:


Or you could

5. put it through again for more blended colors and get this:



So I have one of each now so I can compare how they spin. I think I like the less carded one better, but if the other spins dramatically better, I'll have more blended batts in the future. Also, my batts go really well with Dominion Seaside:





So the reason why this is so exciting is that now I can sell them as batts instead of having to spin them all. They probably won't all be done in time for the show (where I should focus on getting as much yarn spun as I can) but could later go on Etsy.

Also, the craft show is in less than a week. Here's the link, for anyone who is local to Boston or will be around next weekend:

http://www.masscraftmarket.org/