Transcript for

Episode 113:

4 Tips on Creating Wool/Silk Blends with a Drum carder

I love silk, once it's actually in yarn. Before that, not so much. It goes everywhere: all over my clothes, all over the studio. I've even managed to get silk in my mouth and up my nose. Not pleasant. But I really love spinning and knitting wool/silk blends, so over the years I've found a few tricks that make prepping wool silk blends go a bit more smoothly. In today's episode, I'll share four of them.

Hello there darling Sheepspotter! Welcome to episode 113 of The Sheepspot Podcast. I'm Sasha, and I have the best job in the world. My job is helping you make more yarns you love.

I just finished a big (2100 yards worth) combo spin that consisted almost entirely of commercial wool silk blends in combed-top form. And every night I would end my spinning session just covered in silk. It's just an unruly fiber. Here are four tips for making your own wool silk blends with a drum carder. I can't promise that they'll prevent you from getting covered in silk--they actually won't--but they will help you get a good blend that's lovely to spin

Prep your hands

Tip #1: Silk will attach itself to any and every rough spot on your hands as you work with it.  So I want to share this amazing tip to prevent that from happening. I learned this in a class on spinning silk hankies with the Yarn Harlot many years ago, and it works like a charm. Mix a couple of tablespoons of sugar with some olive oil, slather it all over your hands, and rinse. I know this seems like it's too simple to make a difference but it absolutely will. So thanks, Stephanie.

Cut the silk

Tip #2: My next tip is to cut the silk to the same staple length as the wool that you're using. Spinning wool/silk blends can be tricky because silk is a smooth, slippery, and long fiber. If it's longer than the wool in the blend, it can be difficult to keep the proportions of wool and silk consistent as you draft. In some cases you'll encounter places in your fiber supply where you've used up all the wool and you're suddenly just spinning silk. If that's ok with you, you do you. If not, though, ensuring that both the wool and the silk have the same staple length will make your life much easier. Remember my one-and-only rule for blending fibers: it's all about the staple length!

If you're working with very long silk and you don't cut it, and it extends over the doffer strip, you'll have trouble doffing off the batt, because you won't be able to break those very long and very strong fibers with your doffing stick. Another excellent reason to cut your silk.

For a thorough blend

Tip #3: Silk is paradoxical in that it both wants to fly all over the place and likes to clump up. I'm not sure how that's possible, but it does. If you want the wool and silk to be thoroughly blended, be prepared to card your batt multiple times--more than you would for a well-carded wool-only batt.

You can speed this process and save yourself some passes by loading the silk so that the fibers are parallel to the axis of the licker-in. This, in my experience, is the best way to use the teeth of the carding cloth to break up the clumps of silk.

After the first pass, I'll break the batt up into chunks, spread them out so that I can see my feed tray through them, and put them through the fiber again sideways. Again, this gives the carding cloth the best chance to break up the clumps of silk and allow it to integrate more fully with the wool;

Layer the silk in a wool sandwich

Tip #4: You may find that if you put silk through your drum carder it will resist going into your carding cloth of your big drum and irritatingly wrap itself around the licker-in. One way to avoid this is to create a silk sandwich: a thin layer of wool, a thin layer of silk lying parallel to the licker-in, and another layer of wool. You really do want to keep the layers thin: you should always be able to see through your fiber to the wool or metal of the feed tray to avoid overloading the carder and potentially damaging the teeth of the carding cloth. So it's a thin sandwich. If you're having trouble getting the layers thin enough, try an open-faced upside-down sandwich with the wool on the top layer and the silk on the bottom

The wool in your sandwich is going to encourage the silk to feed onto your main drum and not get all wispy and wrap around the licker in.

Another option is just bypass the licker-in and apply the silk directly to the large drum. This is a useful technique if you want to confine the silk to specific areas of the batt. If you want to distribute the silk evenly through the batt, though, I think the sandwich method does that best.

So, I've talked about four tips for making wool/silk blends on a drum carder: prepare your hands, cut the silk to match the staple length of the wool, feed the silk into the carder with the fibers parallel to the axis of the licker-in, and, even better, do that with the silk encased in thin layers of wool.

That's it for me this week. Thank you so much for listening! I sincerely hope this episode has been useful to you. As always, you can comment on and discuss this episode in a dedicated thread inside The Flock, Sheepspot's free online community for inquisitive hand spinners. You'll find a link to the thread in the description for this episode in your podcast app.

I will be back next time with some words of advice about spinning commercially-prepped fiber blends in which the staple lengths of the fibers involved are not the same. Until then, I hope you make some time to spin something. I think you'll find that it does you good.