Wool Combs

hello welcome to my channel about creating and using hands button my name is Lisa and in today's video I'm going to talk about little combs I'm going to show you the little combs that I have in my fiber studio give you a brief demonstration how some of them are used talk about the kind of preparation you can expect to get from combs and finally I will direct you to resources that I have found very helpful as I became more proficient and will call me I hope you enjoy this video and if you'd like to see more make sure you hit the subscribe button and don't forget to hit the bell so here are three sets of columns that I have it by fiber studio and I'll go through them in the order that I purchased them this first pair are made by a company called Valkyrie and these are the Valkyrie extra-fine and I have to say I purchased these without really knowing a whole lot about wool combing and they sort of staunton my stache for a while before I had the courage to actually try using them of all the combs that I have these are the ones that I use the most frequently I find that they're very versatile these are the extra finds I've combed everything from CBM merino PACA to some coarser wolves like Romney and coop worth on these these have - this is called pitch they've got two layers of pins here and I bought these with this pad here and this is a pad that you lay flat and bolt it to the surface of your workstation so that you can to make combing easier so it sits like this and I'll I have some video a demonstration on how I use these so these are the the most frequently used that I have I find that they're the most versatile they are a little bit heavy they call the mini combs but there you can see they're quite large so the next pair of combs that I purchased were these these are from Riley wood and fiber arts on Etsy and I was looking for a pair of calms that were more medium and that also were a little lighter weight and what I liked about Jason's calms is that the handle is very ergonomically shaped so they're very comfortable to use these did not come with a stand so you have to use these completely hand held I suppose you could fish and some sort of you could you could probably bolt it down with a clamp but it doesn't come with a pad these are very nice I like these because they're he describes them more for medium wool they are very very sharp I would say of all the combs that I have these are the sharpest and I just would caution you that when you're using combs you have to be very very careful that you don't injure yourself so I do like these quite a bit I use these quite often sometimes I'll call my fiber with these first this is a medium calm and then I'll comb them again with the extra fines just to get a really nice preparation and then my husband made these little leather covers for there's a little piece of hair there or fiber there but my husband made these I thought they were really nifty and I'm trying to get him to make him for all the other homes as well but they got a little snaps and they store quite nicely so here's another pair of columns that I just purchased recently and these are the Louet double row fine combs and what's really lovely about these combs is they're extremely lightweight so if you have any issues with your wrists or you know any any problems with your wrists or fingers these are really nice they're very lightweight they're also very they do the job but they're not quite as sharp as some of the others these combs are great for very fine fibers so I'm gonna give a demonstration on how I use my Louet combs to comb baby alpaca so I like I really like these combs for fine shorter fibers like Shetland very very fine Shetland AM angora bunny or alpaca so I'll demonstrate how I use those okay so these are the three sets of combs that I find to be quite useful and very very portable now I'll show you two other pair that I have in my studio these combs are from Benjamin Greene studio I purchased these in 2014 off of Etsy what's beautiful about these combs is the way they were they were crafted they're just they have the self storage system that stores them on a shelf very securely and they also come with these clamps so they're really a self-contained unit you don't need anything else let me show you how these work so we've got these two cans here [Applause] and here they are they pretty these I would say are my they're the thickest tines and they're the farthest apart and Benjamin has a YouTube video on how he uses these combs they are very beautiful I just find that I don't tend to use them that frequently because I don't find it there they are great for very fine fibers they're very good for fibers like this so this is a this is a Romney cross so or here's another example this is a this is also a Romney cross I've also used them for cope worth I didn't find them as useful for the finer fibers as you could see they're further apart I'm sorry that's my air-conditioning unit going on I hope it doesn't isn't distracting so aren't these very they're very pretty so they come like this and what's neat about this is I know I'll demonstrate this but these you can see they're they're just a little bit dusty if they come with their they come with their own clamps you can see that I haven't used these very much I don't know if he if mr. green is still in these I checked his Etsy shop just today and the last pair that he sold was in 2018 so I'm sure he has updates they are very nice combs they think especially if you if you work with a lot of longer fibers you're the closest that I have to a set that would be similar to English combs now English combs and I'll insert a picture here are a very heavy duty type of comb they often come with four pitches and they produce a lot of comb top in a very short amount of time and then the last set of combs that I have are these babies from Pat Russo get Russo is Robin Russo's husband I believe and she he makes the famous st. Blaise combs which I think are very similar to Valkyrie I've been tempted to purchase them but I think they would be redundant in my in my fiber stash here so these are called peasant combs and if you're familiar with what a hackle is see remove this over if you're familiar with what a hackle is that's what this reminds me of it isn't not a hackle she says that peasant combs are efficient for organizing fiber and also spinning can be done right off the combs if you can get your wheel close enough to the the combs these combs that I have right here are from a man that I bought it for money at see his name is Benjamin Greene and these are beautifully made to pitch combs the tines are quite far apart so I would consider this a combs that are appropriate for medium to coarse or wools so I'm gonna demonstrate how I comb this Romney which has quite dirty tips and parts and I'm gonna show you how the combs clean up a fleece like this beautifully this fleece doesn't have very much of edge matter really none to speak of but it is does he have dirty tips so I'm gonna show you the setup here I don't know what I looked on his Etsy shop and I saw that he has not sold a pair of these in quite a while in 2018 was the last time he set so oldest said so I don't know if they're still available and I think I misspoke before I think these are actually the first set of combs that I bought and then after I bought these I got my Bell carry extra finds which are the ones I use most often but in preparing this video I sort of rediscovered these combs and I kind of love them I think that they're perfect for you know Romney Corey day all border Lester down here first so it goes through here and then that goes like this so nice isn't it just an elegant righty-tighty lefty-loosey right okay so these are the stationery combs this one and it's got a little pin I think it was inspired by the English combs the three and four pitch combs these are just really really nice and I'm very careful not to lose these so what I'm aiming to create are these combed nests that when I spin I know exactly where the tip was this was the tip and I spin from the tip out I just find that it works better for me but other people want to spend from the other end so these are the knesset that are formed from wool combs and this is the kind of this is just a quick skein that I had spun up but what do you have with the worsted preparation is you end up with a very smooth yarn it's it's got a it's more dense than say a woolen yarn and it has more shine so it's going to bring out the shine in the fleece so because all the locks are in one direction it's going to enhance the sheen of the yarn and typically people will spin with a short forward draw when they have a worst of preparation but that's not necessarily you can certainly spin woollen if you like so yeah really pretty very beautiful fiber okay so I'm going to show you how you create these nests here so I'm gonna take my locks and I'm going to carefully find the tips these tips are very easy to find since a lot of them are dirty so they're easy to find and I pull them out of the roving by the tips and these combs are going to take care of all those dirty tips as you will see I did calm some of this fiber with my Bell carry extra finds but I actually found that these coarser combs did a quicker and a better job it was less work on my part this is going to fluff up quite a bit as I do my combing now what I'm going to do next is spray a little bit of oil water and essential oils just I'm just gonna put it on the on the locks I don't spray the combs but if the combs are not going to get hurt if you put a little oil on your combs it's wood so I don't worry about the combs getting injured or damaged or anything like that and then this this is just water so sometimes I'll you just use water but typically what I'll do is I'll squirt all this on the fiber before before I load the combs but I just forgot when I'm doing this here alright so I'm gonna take my combs and I'm going to go like this just grabbing the tips if you can see my just the tips gonna flip it over no Benjamin green does have a YouTube video demonstrating how to use these combs and he does this additional step called planking I believe it is and planking is you pull your roving off and then you put it back on you real a on Peter teal talks about that in his book on calming and I think the purpose of that is to mix the shorter fibers with the longer fibers I don't do that with my fiber I did do it I don't notice they have much of a difference so I don't I don't do the planking part ok you can see I have very little waist here and I'm just gonna pull that off and now look how pretty that is fluffy I'm gonna kind of fan it up a little bit push it up a little bit here and now I'm going to go this way all those dirty tips are going away and there's my waist I'm gonna put that off on the side I'm gonna look it over I see there's still a little bit of dirt and a little bit of fiber that has not been combed so I'm gonna do another pass it just depends on the fiber I do try to keep my hands out of the way of the combs I put my hand behind my back because I tend to do this and you can hurt yourself you don't want to do that he asked me how I know yeah first-aid nearby when you're working with combs these aren't too too sharp but they're still quite sharp all right now I'm gonna go and put them back on one more time and then Dizz it off just be very careful if you are putting your hands there take your time go slowly combing is very relaxing and it create such a beautiful preparation and it's pretty fast again there's your dirt there's your shortcuts this is the stuff you don't want in there okay now I'm ready to dis off so I'm gonna pull it up a little bit make a beard I'm going to use this dis here the yarn will funnel through so you want the concave part facing the fiber this is an old crochet hook and now I'm going to do I'm getting to the end this is the the cut end I want that last and then I go around I got a good tip from Stephanie crafty garden what she does is she puts a little fold here at the tip you can just grab it and pull it through and so this is where I'm going to start spinning and so now I have all these pretty pretty nests of fiber ready for the wheel of all the combs that I have these are the ones that I use the most frequently these are Valkyrie combs and these are the extra-fine there to pitch and you can see when you compare them with the Benjamin green they're quite a bit well finer the the tines are thinner they're closer spaced and they're very good for fine to medium fibers I have calmed coarser bulls on this but it's just a little bit more work these are great again for medium to coarser wools these are very good for fine to medium to even very fine fibers so in this demonstration I'm going to use my pad this is the pad that I purchased with the combs think it's an extra $20 and well worth it these columns aren't they call them mini combs but they're quite hefty when you can see mine have a little bit of a patina because of the oils that I use when I'm doing my what I'm combing my fibers but they'll last a lifetime really so what it does is it sits on your table like this let me raise this up a little bit so they sit like this and I'm going to use my class like before now what you can do is you can pull out the car the car take the pay out a little bit and then your calms don't get in the way of your clamps you can tell I'm super handy here I'm sure there's better clamps easier to use than these but these are fine these are just fine so I'm gonna make sure they're nice and tight you don't want the combs flying off your work station while you're working that would be really bad okay so now so there you have it there they are ready to ready to go so for this demonstration I'm going to show you how I make these nests which spun up into this fiber this is a Finn lamb that I spindle spun from comb nests similar to these and you can see again that worsted preperation worsted yarn tends to have very a very smooth texture and you can really see the plies they look like little pearls or something you can really see the ply structure in the yarn and in a knitted swatch you'll also see better stitch definition than say a woolen yarn this Finn is absolutely wonderful to spin worsted so here are my locks all washed yeah I'm going to give these a spritz first with my combing milking I don't put lecithin in here so I do get a separation of the oil with the water but I don't mind and I'm just squirting it sometimes I put them in a pan just like before all right now once again I'm going to locate my tips but you can just see the tips they're brown I'm gonna pull out the locks and latch the Mon my comb down here so I can more easily spread them out you want to have as little and the back as possible you just want to catch the the cut end on the combs you see I did not wash this in lock formation but I'm having no problems finding identifying the tip in the cut end though of course if you do wash them in lock formation it's a lot easier probably as they said I don't have the the patience for that to pick out each lock and lay them out it's just not gonna happen but I do admire people who do this to do that and really if the occasional lock get slashed on in the opposite direction is it really going to make that much of a difference in your yarn probably not so you could do this ahead of time just pick them all out and have them ready to go you I think that's enough to for the demonstration here so once again I'm going to take my combs and I'm gonna go like this always keeping them perpendicular to the tines let me see if I can show you what I'm doing here like this so I'm doing a circular motion and then you can flip it over just catching the tips of the fibers see it's not quite a bit this makes it so much easier not having to hold that other comb and then as you move through now I'm getting closer and closer and closer to the tines starting at the tips and then going every time what's being left on the combs our short veg matter Knowles things you don't want I see junk you don't want that in your injury yard all right now I'm gonna be on those up a little bit and now go this way now I'm getting a little static here so I'm just gonna use a little water and miss the area I can try to avoid doing this I have hurt myself before there I just got a piece off of there that's okay again I'm getting a lot of static today with this fine fiber can i pulling that up and this is my waist so this is the result of one pass so what I'm gonna do again I'm going to repeat the process second time same as the first and I'm going to comb this again you always want to do an even number of passes so you'll always end up with your fiber back in its original configuration onto the stationary comb [Music] is this is a cow horned is that I got from the lace shepherdess and Etsy this is the traditional material they use for disses Peter teal has instructions on how to make one in his book his wool combing book which is unbelievable in its detail tells you how to make a spinning wheel there too [Music] you [Music] so there there's a bunch of nests here so pretty so fluffy so these are my Russian paddle combs Russian paddle combs are a very old type of comb and what I've read about it is that they are used mainly for short or stapled fibers and not very fine fibers and you can tell that by the spacing of the teeth they're fairly far apart kind of reminds me of a hackle but I think I don't think it's exactly the same so this is how I use my paddle combs I use it to clean up fiber to prepare for my drum Carter so I'm gonna give you a demonstration here this black fleece here is a c BM c BM is considered a fine wool this particular c BM is not extremely fine it's more on the medium side and at first i was flicking the tips to put through my drum Carter but I was injuring myself quite a bit and I found that there was lots of little tiny micro veg matter in the tips so I had this idea to use these combs to clean up the fiber to organize it prior to throwing putting into my drum Carter so you want to make sure these are not readily available anymore I think you can still get a similar comb I think that originally they're designed so that they stack on one another like so and then if you could get your wheel close enough to the columns you can actually spin right off of the off of the combs so so what I do is I take my fiber like so and I just lash it on I'm not very very particular with the direction of the lock because I'm not preparing it for worse than spinning what I'm doing is I'm just cleaning up the fiber getting rid of short cuts vetch matter Nowell's so that I get a nice smooth bat on my drum Carter these work very efficiently and very quickly so I loaded up quite a bit maybe a little bit about halfway a little bit more than halfway this is the fun part here be careful you don't hurt your fingers there okay so got it loaded up here I want to take my other comb and unlike regular calms where you keep the tines perpendicular to one another with these combs you're gonna go straight down so move this over a little bit so when you do this you're gonna comb it wash out you see you ready what I usually do is put garbage can underneath because they do get a lot of dust and stuff that's falling out alright so there you go so you just do this just want to step away from the combs because you don't want to hit yourself here so if what's happening is I took a little too big of a bite there and let me tighten this on here okay so what you're seeing is you're getting the fiber here and you're getting the fiber here as well so you're combing both the fiber on the top comb and the bottom comb simultaneously and it's cleaning it up quite a bit I do sometimes use it in a traditional way if this fiber down here is not getting combed sufficiently okay so that's pretty good try to have about equal amounts on both combs okay so now I'm going to just pull it off in toughest so it will be ready for my drum Carter so I just pull it off like this so this is gonna go in my drum Carter here I have trouble with these combs this doesn't never want to stay and it's hard to get it exactly perpendicular so there's still some shorter fibers here I'm going to continue to pull off until I start to get parts that I don't think I want in my fleece in my bat all right and then this is my waste now I'm gonna do these combs so you can see right here along here there's all kinds of dust because it's really cleaned up the fiber so I take a rag and wipe it out you can see it's very fast and I don't know I do this to transfer the fibers back get calm and again I'm gonna stop here I'm gonna pull off fiber this created a beautiful bat very smooth and free of any noise and so no so you have this big cloud of fiber and it's going to go into my drum Carter this is what I would consider the waist shorter bits little Moyles this is pretty nice there's no vetch matter here so I might save this in my combing waste and use it for felting or something like that now I'm going to see if I can get a little bit more fiber off of this comb I tried using these homes as a hackles and it worked pretty well it's just you can't have anything to long run here I think really three inches is a maximum that you'd want to put on here and again I'm gonna pull these off so you know it's all nice and clean and ready for my drum Carter I wanted to show you what kind of bass I'm getting from that fiber that I'm using my panel comes to organize so I'm getting these beautiful well-prepared baths for spinning and you can see they're just very nice open there's really no naps to speak of here they're nice and fluffy so taking that extra step of basically picking the fleece with the Russian paddle columns has really produced a very nice preparation here [Music] okay I wanted to round out my combing video showing how I go from this which is this the cloud with baby alpaca to this a little comb nest of the alpaca so you can spin directly from this or it would be ready also to blend with other fibers so I'm gonna use my Louet mini combs here the other thing I have is some water this is just plain old water with a little bit of essential oils in it so when you comb when you comb alpaca you don't want to use any oils or grease so if the original fleece doesn't have grease you don't add grease when you're working with it either combing or carding so what I'm gonna do is show you these are my Louet combs they got two pitches so I hold my comb like so and then what I do is I just take the cloud of fiber and I charge the combs like this I'm not picking first of all you can't identify any of the locks for this cuz it's so super fine and fluffy I can see all the static I'm getting or ready you know just keep keep doing that you don't want to get too much back here most of the fiber should be in the front of the combs and I think that's probably more than enough here you can also just kind of pull it off and put it back on so all right there I am I am ready to comb I'm just gonna get a little squirt of water here a little mist cuz you're gonna see you're gonna go a lot of static so now I'm gonna take my combs and I'm going to what I'm doing is I'm going perpendicular my combs are always perpendicular to one another I just grab little bits you can also flip it over upside down but again you want them always to be perpendicular you can see I got most of the fiber transfers from the one comb to this comb so I'm gonna take off my waist here you can throw this into your felting pile or your waste pile put that off on the side and now I'm going to go from this comb to this comb and I'm going to go from the ceiling to the floor so I'm just going to again do the same thing as before what's lovely about these combs is they're so super lightweight they're not too sharp so you could easily do this while you were watching TV or doing something else they're not dangerous I have never hurt myself on these combs any little bits that you have on here that you don't want in your top you want to make sure you catch on the combs over here so here I'm gonna keep going this is just gonna take two passes you can see how it's basically organizing the fibers sometimes the fiber gets stuck at the base of the combs I like to just pull it up a little bit makes it a little bit easier to to get off all right some waste again it's a great way to get rid of edge matter now if you have anything in here that you don't want you can you can do a quick you can do a pass and then you can put it back on or you just organizing the fiber okay so now I'm ready to take this off of the comb you could take this to your wheel your spindle and you could spin it right from the from the combs but I like to pull it off so I'm just gonna lay it on my lay up like so and then I'm just going to pull it off like so now oh I'd like to blend alpaca with other types of fiber especially wool because on its own it's quite drapey has no memory so sometimes I will just pull it off right from the combs and then it'll be ready for blending with wool on my drum Carter so here I have my my top you can see how fine and flyaway this this fiber is it's really really beautiful and it's a very small nest so I usually go or only a couple of fingers because it's this very small nest here and I try to drip maybe I draft it out a little bit and there you have your fibers so it's so flyaway that it's there you have your fiber so this was the other one that I made earlier you can see it's I didn't put as much on this this go around here so it's so warm I can feel it warm in my hands you know so that's how you call baby alpaca with any combs [Music] [Music] so I hope you enjoyed my demonstration of wool combing as you can see wool combing produces a beautiful fiber preparation it's very easy to spin it produces a long continuous strand of roving where all the locks are going in the same direction and it makes for beautiful worsted spinning if all you've ever done is spun commercially comb top I highly recommend you getting some fiber tools and diving into some fleece preparation so what about you do you enjoy wool combing do you have any brands of combs that you really like I'd love to hear about it in the comments below if you do a search on Etsy you can find lots of makers of wool combs I've talked about the Valkyrie I think are the most common ones that I've seen use they're easily found readily available and so are the Louet mini combs but there are other makers and I would encourage you to check them out Bette Smith has some good advice on buying wool combs in her spinners book of fleece she does not recommend the Russian piano columns nor nor do I especially for a new wool comer there probably wasn't where they were an impulse buy I don't feel like they're necessary in my in my fiber tools but I'm glad that I have them and I have thread that you can use them to separate dual coated fleeces and then spin the cell or the undercoat right from the combs I'm experimenting with that and maybe in a future video I'll demonstrate how that's working out for me but right now I just use those combs which it just as a reminder here it's these here I use these as a fiber organizational tool not to create true worsted top I will link some resources below in the description box if you're interested in more information on wool combs so the other book that I found really interesting about what combs is this one by Peter teal this is handle combing and spinning here is a book for hand spinners who aspire to a high standard of professional excellence in their work the book rediscovers many of the old methods and applies modern technological principles to the forgotten trade of all combing so this book is from 1979 I got it on Amazon it's a used book of course it's out of print but this if you want to know about true worsted spinning and true proper worsted preparation this book is a really interesting read what's also really good look at this it's very charming there he is there's mr. ETL spinning his his yard for his cardigan I've got some great illustrations it goes through you know how to prepare your fiber how to the right way to roll the fleece I mean it's just full of interesting information it gives you instructions on how to make your own wool combs like you're gonna do that maybe he also gives you instructions on how to make it is from a cow horn so it's it's really a very thorough book oh and here's a picture of Saint Blaise with the end of that chapter you might feel like offering up a prayer spare a thought then for Bishop blaze patron saint of all comers and one time bishop of subasta something who in the second century suffered martyrdom by having his flesh torn off his body from wool combs so avert your eyes Robin Russo's wool combs are called Saint Blaise for that reason so this is a really interesting book and you can find this on Amazon or in a used bookstore and then the last one I'm going to talk about is due to the mackenzie McEwan's intentional spinner this book is very thorough and she does a very complete job of of how not only to prepare your comb table but how to spend worsted oh yes i wanted to mention if you ask a spinner do you prefer to spin from the tip end or the cut end of the lock you'll hear a lot of spinners say they'd like to spend from the cut end well in my experience I found that it was easier to spin from the tip end and both of these resources here Peter teal and Judith McKenzie actually advocate the other in her book she says to remember to keep the root and the blossom ends in order and spin from the blossom end so she sings to spin from the tip and he says here in his book as well when turning the slider either in a tapa roving it is important to arrange the fiber so that the end was that was pulled off first will be the point where spinning will commence so that in further attenuating the top or roving the fiber will pull out naturally or flow in the same direction that they were drawn from the comb always keep in your mind's eye a stream of fiber from the Sheep to the comb to the spindle in which the direction of the fiber flow does not change I know that might be some esoteric information for those of you that don't know a lot about wool calms but I think it's really an interesting topic I think JC Boggs talked about in one of her ply magazines about what her worsted issues is very interesting so that's it for today I hope you enjoyed this video and if you did I appreciate all your thumbs up and if you're interested in more videos like this make sure that you hit the subscribe button and hit the bell for notifications of future videos so from soulful spinning have fun and enjoy your crafting we'll talk to you very soon you

Channel: Soulful Spinning

Views: 23,325

Rating: 4.9739585 out of 5

Keywords: iMovie, handspinning, woolcombs, spinningyarn, Fleecepreparation

Id: IyOGsQvXmJg

Length: 48min 29sec (2909 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 19 2019