SpinJournal #12: Pick a Card

Today is the Big Day! I'm going to pick those fleeces and get them whipped into something closer to spinning shape than scoured fleece in laundry bags.

I got my picking station set up, and started on the Romney/Coopworth hogget I bought last June. It's a good fleece to start with: lovely-soft, but full of VM (vegetative matter--hay, sticks, dead lady bugs) and second-cuts. I started to comb the fleece, but that's taking forever, and the lock structure is not as intact as I would like for combing. The fleece has been sitting in the studio since last June, and it's time to either spin it or get rid of it.

I discovered pretty quickly that the advice Paula Simmons gives in her book, The Handspinner's Guide to Selling, is accurate: don't let the picker try to take too big a bite. A big chunk of fleece only jams the picker. As the fleece was still pretty much in bunches of locks, I grabbed handfuls and pulled them apart a little bit to keep entire blocks of fleece from being pulled into the picker. The perfect technique seems to be to let the teeth at the closest edge of the rocker skim over the unpicked fleece, pulling a little bit of the fleece down onto the teeth in the cradle. The rocker then moves the fleece across the teeth of the cradle, and off into a basket. It took a few minutes to get the rhythm down (it's more just "push," rather than "push-pull"), and then dark brown clouds of wool began to fall into the waiting basket. Someone with experience can (supposedly) pick 6 to 10 pounds of fiber an hour; I'm not nearly that fast, but I can at least operate the picker safely and efficiently.

Picking was just the first step. Once the basket was filled, I had to card the fiber. Carding makes a nice break from picking. Too much of one task leads to inattention; inattention leads to disaster! Carding the picked fleece led to the next big discovery--why the drum carder came with clamps. My drum carder--a Strauch's Finest--is big, heavy, and doesn't move very much when I card, especially as I'm pretty gentle. As a result, I never put the clamps on it to clamp it down; it sat on the chest of drawers and everything was copacetic. The clamps sat in their little plastic bag in the drawer of drum carding tools until today. I'm no longer working with little teased open locks, or the bits pulled from my English combs, and it became evident pretty quickly that the fastest, most efficient way to card the picked wool was to turn the crank on the drum carder with one hand, while feeding handfuls of the picked fiber with the other. Great! Then the drum carder began to slide around a bit. Not Great! Everything ground to a halt while I installed the clamps and clamped the drum carder down to the shelf. When I started carding again, the drum carder was rock solid, and I started turning out batts of chocolate brown goodness.

After an entire day of picking, carding, and breaks at the computer, I finished! Where I had a laundry basket full of fleece, I have a storage bin (plus!) of dark brown batts. I need to card them all once again, both to thoroughly blend the color and to remove more of the VM, but it's been a good day's work!