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!

Yay! Yarn stash busted and I’ve picked up my spinning again! But oof. Taking a month off to reduce the yarn backlog definitely took the edge off the skills I had built up. It is taking a bit for my fingers to remember the magic.

I have motivation though! My sister bought me a beautiful rosewood ring distaff, and I’m figuring out how to use it.

The purpose of a distaff is to provide a way to keep the source fiber organized while spinning. It is quite frustrating to have the wrong bit of roving wrap itself in the yarn twist as you spin the spindle. A distaff keeps the excess fiber up and out of the way.

The first thing I did was load up the distaff with lots of roving. Oops. Nope. I read some more, then pre drafted my roving (thinned it out), and tried again with much less.

As I am learning, starting off with smaller amounts of fiber is much easier. In the picture above, I am holding the spindle the way I think it was designed to be held. When I wasn’t paying attention, my grip would switch and my finger would come out of the ring, as pictured below.

The distaff definitely helps with fiber management, and as I became more comfortable with it, I was able to load more fiber. There are many different kinds of distaffs as well as other methods of fiber management. So exciting! More experiments!

I loaded two hand fishing reels with spun merino wool, then used the third spindle full to make a three ply yarn. I was hoping that the large spools would keep the single ply from tangling around the stand, but alas, no. Seriously the next time I spin I’m going to fill multiple spindles and ply from the spindles.

I was able to ply most of the yarn, but didn’t distribute the fiber exactly evenly between the three strands, so chain plied the leftover bits, which works just fine.

I had enough yarn this time to make two cakes with my wool winder. Yay! Isn’t the color pretty? It is a combination of four shades of red roving.