As I have mentioned before, I’ve spent the last several weeks creating a new shop. That means I haven’t had a lot of time to actually create new yarn and fiber, but this morning, I got up before the little ones awoke to do some uninterrupted carding on my Ashford drum carder. While I was carding my Lothlorien art batts, I got distracted and started to take one of the batts off the carder before I had added all the ingredients. I guess my coffee hadn’t fully kicked in.

Well, there’s no way to un-take-off an art batt, so I decided to make lemonade so to speak and do an experiment on how additional passes through the drum carder affect the final color of handspun yarn and what is made from the yarn. I decided to show what yarn looks like carded twice, three times, and four times.

Most of the time, I card my batts only once, adding a little bit of each different fiber and color at a time so the batt is blended but the colors remain bright and distinct. I usually prefer the brighter and more distinct colors. Here is a photo of what the Lothlorien art batts normally look like when they are carded just once:

 

And here’s some yarn that I spun from these batts. This is a 2-ply, so it isn’t quite a fair comparison, but as you can see, the colors are all distinct. I love this yarn!

 

 

Next up is the batt after I put it through the carder a second time this morning.

It’s a little hard to tell, but the batt looks a bit more blended, though each color is still quite distinct.

After I carded the whole batt a second time, I split it into thirds and spun the first third. Here that is:

I carded the next portion of the batt one more time. Here’s what it looked like:

As you can see, the colors and textures are definitely more blended than in the last one. And here it is as yarn:

This time, the gold and bronze are sort of sublimated to the green and gray.

Last of all I took what was remaining of the art batt and carded it one more time–a total of four times. Here’s the batt:

Whereas after the first and second times, all the colors are very visible, after the third, the green seems predominant, and after this fourth time, the batt has sort of faded to a silvery gray interspersed with bits of color.

Here’s the yarn:

After I finished spinning all three samples, I laid them out for comparison. The one on the right was carded twice, the one in the middle was carded three times, and the one on the left was carded four times.

I washed them and let them dry in the Arizona sunshine. The next step will be knitting up samples from each.

As I write this, it’s now Friday morning, and I finished knitting up all three samples. On the left, there’s the sample that was carded four times, in the middle is the one that was carded three times, and on the right is the one that was carded twice. One of the things I have mentioned before is how each step you take with fiber to yarn and yarn to knitted or crocheted or woven item makes the colors softer. You can definitely see that if you compare the yarn above to the knit samples below.

 

 

Just like the yarn, the one on the right that was carded twice shows the gold and bronze more distinctly. The one in the middle shows the green more predominantly, and the one on the left is much more silver with other colors showing. The differences between each one are fairly small, but if you compare the one on the right with the one on the left, you can really tell the difference the two additional passes through the carder made.

Here’s a close-up of each one. This one was carded twice:

This one was carded three times:

And this one was carded a total of four times:

I can definitely see how different people would have different preferences based on what they are making and just how they prefer their yarn and projects to look.

Which one do you like best?

In other news, I’m getting ready to be a vendor in Flag Wool, a great wool festival in Flagstaff, AZ, the first weekend in June. I’m a bit of a nervous wreck trying to get everything done in time for the festival. If you would please, say a prayer for me that I get it everything done and that it’s a success.

Part of that everything has been dyeing up some new colorways in my Sparkly Merino Sock yarn base and also in my So Silky Sock base, where I’ve been focused on creating a series based on famous painters. Last but not least, I’m also working on restocking some of the sold-out art batt colorways.

Happy fiber artistry!