Techniques- hand carding

After trying out combing as a method of fibre prep I moved on to having a go with my hand carders. I followed the instructions for hand carding in The Whole Craft of Spinning by Carol Kroll, a skinny but very useful book.

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First I pulled locks out of the washed mass of fluffiness and placed them on the left hand carder.

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The right hand carder is then brushed over the left with the paddles held in opposite directions. I can't show pictures of this in action as I need two hands for the carders and a third for the camera, one day I might recruit some help to take pictures as I go.

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The fibre is moved from the left carder to the right and recarded, this is repeated until all the fibre is nicely combed out across the surface of the hand carders with all the tangles removed.
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I wanted the fibres lined up in a parallel fashion, worsted style (I am a bit sketchy on the woollen/worsted thing, the problems of being largely self taught, but I wanted an approximation of the roving you buy). To achieve this the combed fibre was lifted off each carder, giving a sheet of parallel fibres.
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The sheet of fibres was rolled from side to side to give a fat sausage of fibre (turned through 90 degrees for this photo).
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Just to see if it would work I lightly drafted the fibre sausage to give a longer roving style sausage for spinning,
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The hand carding was definitely a lot faster than combing, although still quite a slow process (compared to waving a credit card at the internet). The finished product was also not quite and neat as the combed fibre, more short fibres has passed through making a few little lumps that needed pulling out. Possibly easier to spin from though.

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There was quite a lot of waste fibre once the locks had been pulled out, shorter bits and tangled fluff, I could possibly have carded this too, but it would only be worth it on a really special fleece. The waste level was comparable to combing as a preparation method.
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And just because they are called hand carders they are not for combing hands with. They are surprisingly sharp!
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