My present for myself

I did it!!

I ordered a drumcarder. I really did it.

Yesterday while washing the wool and dyeing it I noticed how much it really is. I tried to do some handcarding, but that didn't feel good on my wrists. So yesterday I did some googling to find a nice carder I know I was first tempted to buy the junior carder because it was the cheapest, but I did some calculations and heavy thinking and realised I had some more to spend and to better invest in a piece of equiment that would fulfil my needs lnger than to go for the cheapest option and maybe in a years time realise that I needed something different. I found a drumcarder in Germany with Wollknoll which makes batts of 22x97 cm.

The watercoulour dyed wool turned out nice, I think the colour will hold, but I am going to test some of it later. I now have a batch on the stove with egg dye, but I think I put to much wool in it, it kept being very light. So I started out with one tablet of green, then put in another one, then because I found it very blue I also put in some yellow, and then because I found it to still be a lot of uncoloured wool I first threw in another bleu and ten minutes later a yellow one. Finally I also threw in the remaining watercolour "Dark Green"I had.

I now have no green left, so next up will be the reds, oranges and the purples. I will have to keep an eye out on the amount of wool I put in the pot, but this is my experimental stage (I hope it never ends....)

I will save some of the "white" wool to mix it in later withe the dark brown I have after I have spun enough of it to make a nice sleeveless vest.

The red I tried to spin turned out really nice, although very thick. When I tried to ply it it must have looked like some slapstick movie, I was constantly entangled in all thos threads. It was very hard to believe I was only trying to twine 2 threads, it felt like there were lots more!! I'll get the hang of it..

Tomorrow is another school night, but I will try to post some pictures of the dye batch from today and my wonderful wool-drying-mobile and ofcourse my first skein of yarn!