Posts Tagged ‘fiber processing’

A rare sunny day

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009

We have not had a 90 degree day since April. Now, I know I shouldn’t be complaining, but we haven’t had any sun either! Today was a nice sunny day, squeezed in between two rainy days. It has been a while since we could work outside, so I decided to take advantage of the weather and prepare some fleece.

The first thing I do is skirt the fleece. I have a big screen that sits on two saw horses, and I work on the fleece on this screen. The screen allows any dirt and junk to fall through, and since I’m working on the lawn anyway, I can just toss stuff on the ground.

After I skirt the fleece, it goes into the fiber tumbler. This is a handy dandy thing my husband built for me, it tumbles the fiber in the mesh drum, and knocks out even more dirt and short pieces. This step saves a lot of washing time. I have been washing the fiber in big buckets outside, which has been a real timesaver. And, no mess!

When the ground dries out we will have to take out the alpaca chute, and do some nail trimming and stuff. That will make for an interesting post!

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.