Posts Tagged ‘electric carder’

Carder is here!

Saturday, April 4th, 2009

I am looking at the box with my new electric Strauch Finest Doublewide carder. The carder with the tray is larger than I imagined, I know they give the dimensions and all, but it appears much larger in person! We will have to get a different table to put it on, I was going to use the kitchen table, but that clearly won’t work.

I have just one small batch of fiber ready to process, the weather has not been cooperating and nothing can dry outside. The small batch I do have (about 1/2 blanket) took 2 days in the back room on the laundry rack and there are still some wet tips. Sunday looks like a good possibility though!

I will post a picture of the carder when we get it set up. I am going to be using it with the alpaca fiber, once I get that figured out I may do some blending.

Welcome!

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

Welcome to my new blog! Here I will share our progress as we wander our way through the wonderful world of alpacas. While we have been raising alpacas for quite a few years, we are now looking at processing our fiber ourselves, which is where the adventure begins.

Today is the shipping date for my new electric carder, the Strauch Finest Doublewide. I figured if I was going to learn to card, why not learn on the best, right? I chose the larger size because we are processing fleece from 20 or so alpacas, and a suri llama as well. While I wait (impatiently) for my carder to arrive, I am finding that the preparation time for the fiber is nothing to sneeze at as well.

Of course, the weather is not cooperating, and we are supposed to get rain for the next couple of days. Well, fleece + rain = big yuck. So, I started working inside, sorting the fiber and hoping to take it outside to clean. Well, as you can probably guess, that didn’t work! Our afternoon rain started this morning. I shook out what I could, and I am off to wash the fiber.

My first batch will be washed using a children’s shampoo with cream rinse. I read that this helped with the static problem when carding and spinning. We’ll see.

I’ll keep you posted!

Pat