Are there spinning rules?

Are there? By rules, I mean things that must be done (or should never, ever be done). I have thought about this a lot. One example? Well, I don't  believe in weighting yarn intended for knitting while they dry. Setting the twist doesn't require weights and that fiber, once wet is likely to bias and might ruin someone's garment. So, for me, it's a rule; I never put a weight on my yarns while they dry....if they have too much twist, I either run the yarn back through on my e-spinner or I set it aside for weaving.

I'd love some thoughts from others. Does anything go? Are there rules?

Carding wool: Is there a magic bullet?

I process a lot of raw wool for spinning and I really enjoy it. After the wool is scoured and dried, it can carded (by hand or machine) or combed. Clearly, there isn't a way to speed up combing wool by hand except for loads of practice. Are drum carders a different story?

After I'd been spinning for a while, I invested in a drum carder in the hopes it would speed things up. I was doing a lot of art yarn spinning at the time so I bought an Ashford Wild Carder. It worked well. With its super long teeth, it easily held 30 gms of fiber. I was surprised at how long it took me to get a batt (or six) finished so it seemed time to upgrade to an electric carder.

Between research and budget I chose an electric Fancy Kitty. What a treat, no more turning the handle! But, it still took me the better part of a morning to get six batts done. In the meantime, I'd been hanging out at my friend Lisa's house a bit. Lisa has the best of everything; she's been spinning forever and has acquired  a whole lot of tools along her journey. She has about 5  carders including an electric Louet and a Pat Green Supercard and she can't get fiber carded any more quickly than I.

I'd known about Pat Green's carders forever and I really wanted one. I could have afforded a manual one but thought I'd be happier with an electric. When a Deb's Delicate Deluxe came up for sale for a great price so I grabbed it even though it was manual. Guess what? I can card up six batts on the Pat Green as fast as I can on my electric carder!

I might mention that I also have a pair of hand cards. Spinning rolags is the best and I love long draw spinning. I need way more practice with them but it is really nice to be able to sit on the sofa with hand cards and a basket of clean wool to card. Folks skilled at making rolags can probably beat a drum carder at getting wool ready to spin.

In summary: in my experience, carding is a slow process and the carder itself probably plays only a small role in how quickly wool can be turned into batts. The type of fiber and the quality of the fiber matter more than does the specific carder. That's not to say that some carders aren't better than others but you do have to go through the same motions with every carder. So, I don't think that there really isn't a magic bullet  (carder).

What make a carder better? I think a higher ratio between drum and licker in helps. Gearing on manual carders that makes the handle easy to turn is a help. The tpi (teeth per inch) matters too. 120 tpi is going to a pain to use with coarse wool and merino will need extra passes with 42 tpi.  Personally, I think that having two drum carders is a good setup; one coarse and one fine.

Notes:
I never put more that about an ounce of fiber on either carder; I find that adding more results in a compacted batt that doesn't draft as easily as a thinner batt. The two minutes needed to remove the batt is worth the improvement in spinning experience.  Also, GIGO (garbage in-garbage out) applies to carding. Try to card fiber with a lot of second cuts, you'll get a batt full of nepps and noils. Same for chaff; a carder won't clean fiber. Yes, the licker in will grab some of the second cuts and chaff but not all. When shopping for a carder, I recommend getting a lower tpi than you think you need because you can always run the fiber through twice and you'll have more versatility in carding coarser fiber.

Been spinning

Here are a couple of hanks that I finished this week:

I'm so excited about these! This is one full pound of Corriedale.....enough for a sweater (a smallish sweater anyway):

And we finally made it to the beach:

Here's a cool knitting calculator:

And it's free:

Eskimmi's Knitulator

What a handy thing. Ever needed to increase across a bunch of stitches? Check out the Knitulator!

So, you don't like spinning from batts.....

There are lots of reasons to spin from top as opposed to batts; not the least of which is one gives a woolen and the other, a worsted yarn.  If you don't like spinning batts because of all the joins, there's an easy way to turn a batt into a sort of roving.

All you have to do is tear the batt along its length until about an inch or so from the end. Then, tear the batt from the same end along its length again. Repeat until the batt is gone and you're left with something like this:

Here's a breakdown:

Note: this might not work well with a really directional fiber that's been carded into a really directional batt (all the scales on the individual fiber are facing the same way). You could get a batt like that if all the fiber was fed in one direction, say shorn end first. Directional fiber can be sort of hard to draft if you try to draft against the grain, so to speak.

Questions

Questions are a good thing, right? Well, since the advent of Facebook and the like, we can ask our fellow man anything and, more likely than not, get a lot of answers from a lot of people. I follow several groups on Facebook and on Ravelry (a site devoted to fiber) and there are lots of questions and lots of answers on both sites.

So, why is this a problem? Well, I think it is a problem on several levels. First, I have always believed that the more research that I do before I ask a question, the better my question will be and the more likely that I'll understand the answer. This served me well in my career as a Legal Nurse Consultant where I was often confronted with complex medical issues and had to find an expert to address the issue, potentially in court. If I understood a little more, I had a much easier time grasping the answers and even better, knowing when the answer that I was getting was just wrong.

That leads me to the second problem in failing to research before asking; not all who answer are right. I see this a whole lot in the forums on Ravelry and on Facebook. Folks ask a question and they get a lot of uninformed answers. When I first started spinning, I couldn't understand ratios as they apply to spinning wheels. A total mental block actually and I could have asked a million times and wouldn't have understood the answer. So, instead of asking I just kept spinning and kept reading. I read something spinning related every day; it is habit now and I learn something new all the time. I like to listen to other spinners too. I learn a lot that way as well.

And that is the third benefit to researching before asking. You need to find out who the experts really are. As a Legal Nurse Consultant, I accomplished that by reading the relevant literature, noting who wrote seminal papers, book chapter or whatever on the topic at hand and I called them first. The same holds true in the fiber world. There are experts out there and I'd rather get an answer from them than an opinion from non-expert.

 No, there aren't spinning police or knitting police or any other kind of fiber police who tell us that things must be done a certain way, and yes, questions really are great. But, I believe that to get the best information, you need to do some homework yourself so you can ask the right question from the proper source. Even better, you'll be better equipped to differentiate between good and bad information and opinion and fact.

1st Annual Vermont Fleece Sale

The Vermont Sheep and Wool Association held the first fleece sale last weekend. I (and the DH) had fun! First, Randolph, VT seems like a great town and has made the short list for our retirement. There are fiber people there and there's even a fiber mill there owned by a super nice young man!! What more? Mountains! Farms! A cool little town center. Close to Montpelier. 

Anyway, the sale was held in an old red schoolhouse on the campus of Vermont Technical College. There weren't a ton of fleeces but more than enough to have fun picking out a couple that I didn't need. And the prices were amazing; the Border Leicester was only $19.00. Best, 90% of the sales go back to the farmer. I'll be there next year. And, yes, I forgot to take pictures when I was there but here is the fleece eye candy (the white is BL and the gray, Romney).: