Carding Wool like a Ghost

I'd like to talk in this segment about how to make the wool rolls or roll logs that are used in woollen spinning especially on the Great Wheel they're an integral part of doing well done long draw for woollen yarns there are some key things about choosing your wool in the time period I'm talking about upstate New York first in second quarter of the 1800s many farmers are raising their own sheep various types of sheep it is not necessarily spinners flocks it is average combined meat sheep and volts spinning sheep so there are going to be things this has been lightly washed and one of the key things in choosing which fleece you're going to turn into rolls is actually the length I always check with a ruler and when I'm I know I'm going to do some great wheel spinning for woollen I want a fleece lock length that is falling in perhaps three and a half inches or less so this particular batch of sheep's wool is around three and a half it is not impossible to find some that turns out shorter this one is barely three if it is longer and I do have a simple here it becomes quite unpleasant to do long draw drafting it becomes too difficult to get half yarn to draft out in the roll form so once it gets up to four inches or five inches I'm thinking wool combing would be a much better choice so I have selected my washed wool from a fleece and I want to card it on hand Carter's there are a couple of varieties I guess you would say curved Carter's and flat Carter's that depends on the shape of the backs and on the inside there are little curved teeth they're hooked look at them here they're hopped towards the handles and the number of teeth and any square inch does count for it does affect the product I have average sheep's wool here and I'm using antique flat-backed Carter's I like these a lot they're not so easy to find they're on leather so the little hooks are inserted into leather and it gives them kind of bounce it's very hard to describe it it's very pleasant to experience it for many many many years I used Clem's and Clem's Carter's they are in some sort of rubber backing these hooks they have exactly the same idea in that the hooks face the handles and it's obvious they have more hooks per inch than my antique slap backs do I am going to use the flat backs and I'll try to get a little bit in on the curved ones one of the things that always comes up when I demonstrate is I am left hand dominant so if you are right-handed you might want to think you are looking at someone demoing and in a mirror hopefully you will not find that too difficult I am casually pulling out a handful of locks and I am mounting them and I'm not very careful I basically don't want too much wool on there I do not want it to go from here to here when I start I getting about one third of the way up from the bottom the bottom is this part away from the handle this card will face and I want you to watch what I'm happy what I'm doing the alignment of the two cards together the teeth are not touching they're not touching I'm not going like this they are parallel they are starting to get closer and closer they actually the little teeth top just barely touches as it passes by we're going to talk about the transfer law in a minute but I want you to see what's happening the wool is smoothing out it's not so mum P now the trick to moving things from one card to the next is to get the bottom near the handle and lightly lightly lightly bring the bottom card up put it back in carting position very lightly and gently try to keep the wool two-thirds of the way on the card you don't want it up here because it makes it jumps over the hooks and makes a dense little line there that you do not find much fun when it comes time transfer gently up back and carting position just barely here hook touching hook other way you have to kind of go back and forth it's at the top bring the lower card up very gently may not hang on very well that's okay lightly lightly lightly you can you to card back and forth how do I know when I'm done I'm looking for dents spots if there are very few dents spots and everything looks very Airy it's time to take the role of the card when that time comes and I declare it time you're going to bring the lower card up on one side you're going to go to the top of the other car and bring it up again now they're lying very very lightly very lightly I lay my hand down my non-dominant hand and I'm making a little fold-over section this is the miracle part this card is going to have its teeth on that fold and your hand is going to guide the roll as you roll it off and then I like to compress it a little bit in the same motion this is actually laying on the Rollag you must only go in one direction or this trick will not work so now it's nice round compressed and as I look at it I don't see dense spots in fact if I pull on it it pulls out pretty evenly and I wouldn't mind having it pre drafted a little bit longer so that's what I'm doing if you look in old pictures they have long rolls like this I'm going to demonstrate the current Carters now they're used in almost exactly the same way motion is slightly different because they're curved however we are going to talk about going from gray wool to indigo dyed blue wool one of the ways to clean your cars is handles together brushing down this is the old gray and I'd like to get it out of the bottom the teeth it's not good for anything in particular and I'm simply going to throw it out I might do that twice making sure I'm not going to have gray blue added role here if you work a lot with colors or you work with other types of fleece or fibers this will be important so I have my dyed locks and in the same way I did before I'm going to put some on and I will tell you the truth there is no economy and putting too much wool on it's best to stay light and not with a ton and you can see that beginning to card still dents all got its little lumps time to transfer gently wipe the card up time to transfer bring the card up transfer a transfer always has the handles kind of in the same direction even though one might be at a 45 degree angle almost done I need to clear it done take it off take it off and then form your little edge rolled over gradually get it off roll it again this end roll it again it's kind of amazing that you could roll on the teeth but you can and draft it out this particularly silky wall very lovely a lot of people worry about weedy stuff in the row log um the weeds fall out at every operation of it but that's a very lovely spinning roll ugh I had some commercially prepared roving and whenever I encounter something that I'm going to spin I always want to know how long the fiber is they always look good but how long is it the length affects how I'm going to spin it and when I indeed tested it this is in the three inches or less realm of spinning so the fibers shorter so it probably won't do a very good job of being worse than spun and a lot of people would be inclined to spin it from the ends the big problem being that this is kind of dense it's especially unpleasantly dense if you were to spin it as if it were a roller Rollag so what I chose to do since it was my ideal length for spinning woollen on the Great Wheel is I chose to ricard it into a very pleasant spinning roll by carding it again

Channel: Lois Swales

Views: 143,217

Keywords: Wool Carding, wool cards, longdraw spinning, great wheel spinning, historical spinning, spin like a ghost, carding, wool preparation, spinning, reenactment, reenactor, missingspindle, missing spindle, rolags, wool rolls, double drafting, woolen spinning

Id: sytFsIRitZ0

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2016