The newest tool in the Wild Onion Studio is my Strauch Finest Drumcarder. It looks like an overgrown cat brush wrapped around a tube with a hand crank! It was a bit more money than a cat brush, but I’ve put it to great use already, and I thought I’d share what I am doing with it.
For non-spinners, when a sheep or goat is sheared, the resulting hair gets washed, then (usually) combed, either by a commercial mill, or the individual user. I enjoy spinning from a batt, which is a big pillow of combed fleece. You can spin a yarn from a batt, or spread it out and felt it, or even sandwich it between washaway stabilizer and sew it together, using my Trapped Fiber technique.
These are the ingredients I gathered recently for an art batt:
This is what the fleece looks like when it is being carded (combed) onto the drumcarder:
and this is the final result– a beautifully carded batt!
