I had been planning on digging out the drumcarder for a while to blend some fibre in an effort to make a more heathered yarn. So here’s my process, documented. The pictures aren’t great, but they serve as a reminder as to what I did for myself. The fibre is New Zealand Polwarth from maude&me in the colourway “Into the Mirror”. There is a SAL going on at the moment in the maude&me Ravelry group.
I unbraided the fibre and lay it out so I could eyeball it and see the colour segments to tear apart.
Then I tore the various segments and put them together in their own stack.
I then put some of the piles together to lighten the effect of the darker segments. These piles would then be carded together.
And then we card.
This is the first pass, which gives too much variation for my liking. I also found the batt to be a bit too dense, so I split it in half and carded that half (next picture).
The second pass, which looks a bit more blended. One could go further and do a third pass, but this is good enough for me.
And then I repeated the process for the other stacks of fibre! In the end, I found that the best way to card for me was to split each piece of fibre into half lengthwise, then draft it lengthwise, and then pull it apart gently width-wise to create a web, and card that web.
Yardage permitting, I think I might knit an Ebbtide out of it once spun. There’s a KAL going on in the Knit Knit Café Podcast Group on Ravelry, where one can find a discount code for the pattern.