Carding

For who knows how long I wanted a drum carder... Not as much for art batts, but because I love slightly rustic heathery, tweedy yarns, and those are the easiest to do from carded batts. Much like this . For ever so long I borrowed a friend's carder, but I knew that I sooner or later I need my own...
And the time came this spring when sufficien amount of 200 HUF coins collected in the jar :-)  (oh, THAT jar... there might be a separate post coming about it :-)
Having money for fancy thing, like a drumcarder means that I work, I work a LOT these days (no, this is not a complaint, for I love my work these days), but having that much work means that my crafting time is drasticly decreased. I try to swimm with the flood, and work hard to find a balance... but that still needs works. But I am working on it and the result of this work are days like this last Saturday...
Which I set out for... fun, I guess. There was a big organic market event, where the girls and guys of Mare Temporis were playing (oh there is another story to tell), and my friend Tilda (yes, she is the one who is braiding my hair when I have a wooly-hair fit) wanted to try out carding... So we combined the two. Started the day with looking at fabrics, then looking around at the organic market, watching the Temporists and then coming home and took some "travelknitting" pictures (now there is one another thing to write about- the travelknitting picture-story not these pics)

 taking out the carder and have a go with it...

Here is Tilda, with the carder, and below her first tries... she likes crazy bright colors, but the wool she had limited, even though I tried to help out with whatever addition, some bits of extra color, shiny firestar, and whatnot.

Finally managed to try the silk cocoon "waste" another friend brought back from turkey (amazing stuff), and added it to some red and orange fibers. 

And here is her haul for the day...

Then, since the carder was out and I had some red fibers put away for a project, we attacked that, and the end result is a really big pile of batts.

That is carded from six different shades of red, and a purple, giving it a real nice depth, enough for a sweater and then some, hopefully spun by new years, so I can knit the good luck sweater with this. 

Finally there came a weaving friend of mine, who wove a shawl from one of my "everything, but the kitchen sink" type of old yarns (it was carded from handdyed alpaca, merino, angora, silk, and shiny angelina)... so she is having a lavander phase, and I carded this for her...

Now, I only need to find the time to spin, all that :-)