I have got an almost new pair of Schacht hand carders, for a great bargain, from someone who didn’t need or want them anymore, practically a gift.  These are an essential part of my blending experiments past and future! Rather a coincidence as before I had a nice pair of  carders given to me decades ago, along with a splendid drop spindle, from someone who couldn’t use them. Now that I think about it, that was the chance reason I started spinning in the first place. 

Little sentimental pieces of my creative life are falling into place,  one re-acquisition at a time, and I think I am fully kitted now, having all the bare essential tools of the trade.  Anyway, as creative energy slowly returns, so do lists of ideas, rolling out on the straight and narrow progressing path,  in patient commitment to my knitting & spinning,  and sharing the process here on my blog.  

Speaking of this blog, I want to mention that it was ten year anniversary a couple of days ago, when I started this WordPress blog  with this first post ( soon thereafter I transferred all the relevant earlier dated posts from another blog I had)   and ever since I have truly been immersed in what it has become, documenting my life and my creative endeavors,  things and details which may have otherwise been forgotten.  

I love blending colors and fibers , even more than spinning, and almost as much as knitting! The reason I wanted a pair of wool carders is because I hope to pre-blend some color and tweedy neps before layering on my blending board, as I have learned that my jumbo sized board really is a work of labor to load and reload, quite exhaustive for fine tuning blends. Sometimes I have to lift and reblend the 50g batts three or four times before it is nicely homogenized, then multiply that by about 10 to make 500g, it becomes a serious amount of work. So I am thinking about using hand carders to premix parts of the blend, and curious to see if I can have more control over the results as well as save myself a lot of effort.  Coming up– premixes from the hand carders to layer into a fully loaded blending board project — watch this space!