Wool processing

Once scoured and accumulating in a box it was time to do some more processing trials:

Wool can be spun in two ways - as worsted: think shiny, less 'lofty', stronger, or
woolen: lofty (holds lots of air = warmer), a whole lot less ordered, and less strong.
In reality there are many many varying combination of these two methods used to spin wool.


Basically they both start the same way - each lock is flick carded lightly to spread out the fibres (which mostly retain their form through the scouring process - perhaps loosening the crimp a little).  This is done on your leg on a piece of protective leather.

flick carded lock

Once a whole lot of these have been done then you can proceed to one of two steps depending on the method of spinning (or varieties chosen).  For woolen you typically spin from a rolag (no hard and fast rules, there are other ways).  A rolag is prepared by taking opened up locks and using hand carders gradually straightening out the fibres as they are 'brushed' from one carder to the other.  I'm just beginning to learn how to do this.  Typically this method is used for 'shorter' fibres (once again no hard and fast rules on where that mark lies), with the fibres being more chaotically arranged in the length of the yarn once spun.

hand carded rolag

For worsted spinning the fibres are typically all arranged in line along the length of the yarn.  This can be done by a couple of methods, but the one I have used for this test is to use my drum carder to make a batt.  Running the opened locks a couple of times through the carder produces a beautifully soft, ready to spin batt.  Noting that the batt in the picture is about 1/2 size (as I only used a few locks in the test).

drum carded batt