A couple of weeks ago Lisa very kindly brought her new-to-her drum carder along to spinning group and let me have a play with it.

I think my carding technique needs improvement but it was a lot of fun! I had two shades of red merino fibre which I blended together. Both from Fibrecrafts, the darker colour is called Crimson, and the brighter one Scarlet.

Here is a very bad picture of the two different colours, the darker on the left, the brighter on the right.

And here is one of the carded batts. I did just one pass, and put the colours in in layers so you can’t see the blended colours particularly well here.

There are a few knobbly bits where my feeding onto the carder wasn’t particularly good, and they have made the spinning a little bit lumpy (along with my general inexperience). I have started spinning the singles, and have done about half now. I am hoping to do a bit more of this over Christmas.

Hopefully you can sort of see the two colours. It is eventually going to be a 3ply, hopefully about DK weight, and become part of my handspun leaves waistcoat. I must assess the yarn I have spun so far for that, and see how I am doing.