My birthday was last month, and rather than sock the money I received away to justify all the little extra craft purchases I make, I decided to splurge on a somewhat larger toy. Enter the Drum Carder. A Brother Drum Carder to be precise. What is a drum carder? It is a mechanism for preparing wool for spinning. I have a pair of very nice Louet hand carders, and a pair of English wool combs that look like (and in point of fact, were used as) medieval torture devices. But both of these methods put a great deal of strain on the elbow (and the forearm and the shoulder, and the back and the biceps and the… you get the idea, but it is my elbow that is still recovering from bursitis acquired almost a year ago putting in my garden). The drum carder doesn’t do anywhere near as good a job as the wool combs, but it is a heck of a lot faster. And it was my only hope if I was ever going to get the three fleeces prepared that have been moldering in my garage for almost two years. I have to confess, I chose this model primarily on its price point, which at almost $150 cheaper than the next least expensive, and $300 cheaper than the more established brands, was almost reasonable. The edges are a little rough on the Brother (literally) but it seems to get the job done. I am over all quite pleased with the purchase.

So, out from the garage comes (drum roll please…) a Finnsheep fleece! I purchased this almost two years ago at the Fall Fiber Festival and Sheep Dog Trials. (If you live in the Virginia area and are a fiber geek, I highly recommend it. The location is beautiful and while there is a little bit of everything, it is not so overwhelming as the Maryland Sheep and Wool.) I went the festival with the intention of picking up some llama fleece and a coarser wool for rug weaving. This finnsheep fleece I picked up as an afterthought. It was pretty clean and very cheap. At only $3 a pound, the three pound fleece ran me only $9. And once it was washed, it turned out to be beautiful.

It was soft and almost downy, and shorter than most of the fiber I have worked with in the past. The fleece had more second cuts than I would normally prefer (That’s where the sheerer didn’t get all the way down to the skin on the first pass), and was probably why it was so inexpensive.

So, I started working it up with the drum carder. It took a few times to get the hang of it, but it started coming along quite nicely and I was turning out nice clean bats of fiber about 3 to 5 times as fast as I could have done it by hand.

I was distressed, however, by the amount of unspinable fluff I was generating. (ok, anyone halfway good at spinning long-draw would have had no problems, but that is not me). One of my friends said it looked like good doll stuffing, and another asked if we could felt it. So I tried it. And guess what? It felted easier and quicker than any wool I have ever worked with.

Then I did what I should have done before I even washed the thing. I checked my references.

These two books are awesome by the way, and right there in black and white: “Finnsheep are known for the felting quality of their wool”. Boy am I lucky it didn’t turn into a felted mass in my washing machine. I guess that’s a good test of my wash methods. So here I am with a pound and a quarter* of beautifully felting wool. Now the question is: what to do with it?

*”Wait,” you say, “a pound and a quarter? What happened to the three lb fleece?” More about that in a later post.