Color Blending on a Drum Carder

Since I started dyeing wool and yarn I have a stash of really nice, naturally dyed fiber as well as some colored fleeces from colored sheep. I decided to try blending some of them on a drum carder. I have made 'art batts' by sandwiching different fibers together and then carding them. This is great for creating funky yarn, but I wanted something more uniform in texture. I put all the different colors of roving I have together with some colored fleece and picked out several I thought would meld nicely together.

I looked through my stash of miscellaneous fiber bits I have purchased at various places and times to add to my wool. I picked out some 50% Marino superfine-50% Tencel in Teal and white. I brought out some grey and some brown colored fleece and chose some roving dyed with red cabbage, onion skins and madder. These looked pretty nice together. I thought that adding the Marino/Tencel blend would add a little shimmer to the yarn without getting too flashy.  The base color was the red cabbage (on the bottom of the photo-it is blue-green, I know).

I started by applying a thin even layer of the red cabbage roving. To that I added bits of color. When I wanted a layer of color, as with the red cabbage, I applied it using the small roller to feed it to the large drum. If I was applying a color for punch or that I wanted only in certain places, I applied it directly onto the drum. When I got to a spot where I could no longer see a color, I added some more. If I thought it looked a little drab I found another color to add. When I thought the colors were getting too bright, I calmed them back down with some more red cabbage or some of the silver grey fleece.

As the batt was forming on the drum I kept a picture in my mind of the finished batt and how the yarn would look. I had a loose idea of what I wanted by thinking about New Mexico and the colors of the Southwest. It is pretty difficult to get really specific on a drum carder, but you can create beautiful color combinations and it gives you some control over how blended together the colors become. I new it was time to stop adding fiber when the drum was no longer picking up the wool from the small feeder roller. Below is a picture of the first batt completed on the drum.

I removed the batt with two large knitting needles, drafting and rolling it into rollags. I got five rollags. from this batt. 

 

I made another batt as much like the first as I could I tried to load the colors in a similar manner and also tried to get the batt about the same size as the first.  I got another five rollags from the second batt. I ended up making one more small batt, as that was all the red cabbage roving I had. Thirteen rollags total. I put them all in a basket and would spin them randomly to diminish the effect of coming from different batts.

I spun the rollags into a fine singles. Spinning from the rollag is really nice. You just tease the wool from one end. I knew I wanted the yarn plied, but wasn't sure how. I didn't want to ply two singles together because I didn't want to barber pole the colors on top of each other. Because the batts were made on a drum carder, I couldn't really control how the specific colors came off. I wanted them to stay as clear as possible.

 

 I decided that Navajo Ply was the way to go. I can't really describe how to ply this way here without making a video. It is a way of plying a three ply yarn from a single strand by making a loop in the single and bringing the the thread through the loop and spinning it all together. It is really best to watch a video or two. It can seem really tricky at first. Like anything else with spinning, you just have to practice until you 'feel' it. A big thing to watch out for is over-plying and getting a yarn with too much energy. It will appear over-twisted until it is washed, so don't expect it to ply back on itself nicely on the bobbin. It is important to keep a consistant amount of twist in the singles and matching it with the same amount of opposite twist in the yarn. A couple videos that I have seen that are really helpful are Susan Anderson - Navajo Plying and Navajo Plying.mp4 - Charlotte Bech. Both of these are well done and easy to understand.

This is my finished 'Taos' Navajo plied yarn. I ended up with about 180 yards of worsted/DK weight yarn. It is a very soft yarn with a nice amount of loft.