A small dream has finally come true.

I’ve been wanting a drum carder for at least five years. I’ve been looking into various brands and have tried out a few different drum carders. They all can do good jobs, but they all have their quirks.

Last week I finally bit the bullet and we bought one, plus another fun fiber prep tool.

We got the Ashford Wide Drum Carder and blending board. We got these from our friends at The Fibre Garden.

We got to play with the store’s tools for a couple hours and had a lot of fun. Both tools are easy to use and we made a few sample batts and rolags. I thought I was going to have to put in an order for the two items but they let us have the store’s drum carder, which was just out of the box that day, and the blending board which just arrived that day as well! Saved having to go back in a few weeks to pick them up.

This drum carder will work pretty well for us. It has a wider drum, so we can get larger 100g (4 oz) batts off of it. We work with a lot of fine fibres, like merino, silk and alpaca, and this carder can handle those pretty well.

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When we got it home I tried out some scrap merino fleece on it. The fleece is pretty fine, but the butt ends of the locks are a bit matted and felted. I teased open the locks as best as I could and then carded it 4 times. This gave a nice fluffy preparation. There were some neps from second cuts and the felted bits of butt ends. The sample I spun was pretty nice, but not very consistent. I’m going to try this again but will flick the butt ends to open them up a bit or to get the felted bits off. This should make the carding easier.

I’ve got two projects coming up for the drum carder. We have some white alpaca fleece we need to card up. It’s got some problems with matted tips and a lot of veg matter in it. It will be interesting to see how the carder handles that. The second project is re-carding some blended batts I made almost 5 years ago. They’ve become a bit squished in that time and this will help fluff them up. I plan on then dizzing them off into roving. They are a blend of wool, mohair and silk and are for a sock project. There should be enough for one pair plus extra for gloves or something.

We got the blending board mostly for Van, but I’m sure I’ll be playing with it as well. Van’s been playing a lot with colours for making corespun yarns. He’s been mostly doing this on hand cards. With those you can only get about 5 grams of fibre on a rolag, so he has to prepare a lot of them to make his yarns.

With the blending board he’s able to paint on the fibres any way he wants and get about 50g of fibre onto the board. Much more efficient! He can then take the fibre off as one large batt and either roll it up and spin it as one large rolag or strip it to make a bunch of smaller rolags. We’ve also found a video on dizzing off of the blending board to make a roving, so that’s something we are looking forward to trying.

Having both of these tools will make things a lot easier for future projects. The thought of having to hand card enough fibre to make a sweater makes my hands and back ache! Doing that much on the drum carder will be a lot easier and quicker.