I’m practicing with my wool carders! Carders are wooden paddles with wire bristles, like a large brush. You use them in pairs to prepare fiber for spinning. I have a beautiful bundle of rainbow colored merino wool roving my Mom gave to me, dyed in a repeat pattern. I decided to pull the colors apart and make a continuous rainbow yarn. This gives me a chance to not only use the carders, but to practice blending colors as well.

To blend the colors, I loaded the carder and tried to spread out the color to reduce streaks. Since the staple length (the length of the hair) is longer than the sections of color, most individual fibers have more than one color so it was impossible to completely separate colors and maintain the integrity of the fiber. It worked out well, though, because after carding I ended up with nice blended colors! I carded each section three or four times before rolling the fiber up to make a rolag.

There is an art to carding fiber. Most of the instructions I’ve read stress not letting the wire bristles touch. I didn’t understand that at first. Then as I worked with the carders I saw that as you draw one brush across the other, the fibers pull out. It is possible to brush the fibers to pull them out and lift them from the other carder without touching bristles and without burying the fiber into the bristles. I’m still working on the technique!

Once I had the colors blended sufficiently, I rolled the bat of fiber up, making a rolag.

I’m really pleased with the color blending. Now it is time to spin!

A what? A niddy noddy is a simple device to make hanks (yarn wrapped in a large circle) of yarn, usually used after spinning onto a spindle. I thought that maybe my swift (was which is used to hold hanks while winding yarn into a ball or cake) would work and I wouldn’t need a niddy noddy (say that 10 times fast), but the swift doesn’t keep it under enough tension and my single ply yarn was kinky.

I already had 1/2” PVC pipe, so I went to the hardware store for two tee fittings and four caps. I cut the pipe into lengths of one 16” and four 7” pieces with my band saw. Assembling was easy, and I gave the finished H shape a half twist.

Winding the yarn took a little thought, but once I had it down it was a nodding kind of action, so I can see why someone called it a niddy noddy (although I still think the name is akin to thing-a-ma-jig).

I made the central post 16” so that the resulting height with tee fittings would be 18”, which should make each loop of yarn around 2 yards. So I think I made about 84 yards of yarn. I used some contrasting bits of wool yarn to tie the centers so that when I do take it off the niddy noddy it shouldn’t become a tangled mess. The nice thing about using PVC is that I can rinse the yarn to set the twist with the yarn still under tension on the niddy noddy. We’ll see how the yarn comes out when it is dry!