Carding Silk Roving with Alpaca fleece for Hand Spinning.wmv

I wanted to blend enough black alpaca from the fleece of Diamond with rainbow dyed silk roving to spin two skeins of approximately 300 yards each. Here is what I did - very "scientific" as you'll see. The basic steps:
pick alpaca
split some silk roving into 6 "equal" portions and cut the parts into 2" pieces
layer the alpaca and silk as I feed it onto my Patrick Green Super Card
Card 6 batts - it takes 3 batts to spin one 300 yard skein (which is also one full bobbin on my Jensen 30" double treadle production wheel). I use this type of "batt measurement" a lot in spinning. ;-)
Divide each batt into three pieces and recombine with other batts to mix the 6 up. This will help even out the colors and the silk. Guess I could have divided them into 6 pieces but I didn't.
Recard each of the strips - I divided each strip into three pieces before recarding it so I didn't run too much through at one time.
After I'd finished recarding I pulled a roving from the drum instead of removing the whole batt. I prefer to do this so I have roving ready to spin. You can remove the whole batt and tear it into strips for spinning if you prefer.
Now to spin - I plan to do a yarn that is approximately a "DK weight" - which isn't a scientific weight at all, but knitters will know what it is. Should knit up at about 6 sts per inch. The yarn will be two ply and should have lots of silk highlights for wonderful color showing out from the jet black background.
I could have blended the fibers on the picker, but I wanted to "measure" what I was doing with carded batts and used this method of blending instead.
Maybe next video I'll blend on the picker.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• alpaca
• silk
• carding
• blending fibers
• patrick green super card
• triple pick
• fiber preparation
• hand spinning

[alpacanut]

Great vid thanks for posting, learnt how to pull a roving straight off the drum.