I purchased a Fricke Petite drumcarder about four years ago. I had spent some time researching drumcarders offered by various companies, and this one was the best compromise of the traits I was looking for. I decided that I haven't seen many carding photos or tutorials out there, so here is mine. I sometimes start with raw sheep, llama, or alpaca fleece and take it through all the processing steps, or start with commercially prepared fibers and blend by hand. In this next sequence I'm starting with a raw alpaca fleece from Happy Valley Alpaca Farm.
This is a relatively clean fleece, but you can see in the picture on the left that there is still a bit of vegetable matter (VM). The picture on the right shows the staple length (length of fibers) and also the lock structure. As is typical for alpaca, it has a beautiful, lustrous, fine staple. The lock is only loosely held together, mostly by the bit of gunk stuck to the tip. I actually use those dirty and slightly mattered tips to pull locks from the fleece if I want to deal with each separately in some organized manner. Alpaca fleeces are usually very dense on the animal, but when sheared they quickly relax and open up, as they don't have the crimp or scales that holds wool together so well. As a result, it's best to buy a fleece that was skirted straight off the animal because it all gets jumbled up pretty quickly.
So next I pick out all the bits I don't want before I wash it.
I tend to pull off tips of the locks if I can. If they can be pulled of with a firm tug, it means that the fiber is weak there from sun damage, for that is the only part of the lock that is exposed to weather (also, sometimes the fleece is parted down the spine). This also gets rid of a majority of the dirt and VM present in the fleece. I then washed the fiber in warm water with either a small amount of Dawn dish soap or wool wash (because alpaca isn't greasy, just dusty). After it dries, I card just the alpaca once through on the drumcarder.
On the left is the alpaca batt and some Blue-faced Leicester top ready to go. I weigh the out about a half ounce of each fiber to make a fifty-fifty blend, and make little piles of pre-weighed fiber to turn into batts. For the first go around, I pull off staple length chunks from the batts, top, or roving (see above left). I card about three tufts of each fiber in turn, to create thin, solid layers on the drum. I usually feed the the tufts (or opened locks) at an angle, as it seems to aid in the goal of separating fibers slowly onto the large drum with no clumping. After the ounce of fiber is the drum, I remove the batt and rip it into three to four strips. Then I attenuate the strips out, just like predrafting for spinning.
Next, I feed the fiber in again, spreading the strip wide with my left hand so that the drum fills evenly across its width. I repeat the last steps, usually mixing up strips from different batts so that the blend is more uniform throughout the whole batch. Three to five passes is usually enough to get a nice even blend in each batt, with no visible chunks of different fibers.
Above left are finished batts, and on the right is a batt held up to the window to illustrate how clean and even the finished product is.
I love using this 50/50 alpaca/wool blend for spinning, as the yarn is warm, lustrous, and strong, yet lofty and elastic. This is also the blend I usually use for cobweb felt scarves.
Tomorrow, we will overview spinning without carding.
-M
