Back in the middle of April I took myself off up to Stourbridge for some woolly fun organised by wrigglefingers (aka Jill). There were a small but select bunch of us, and we all brought what we were working on at the moment, or things we were keen to learn more about. I bent Jill’s ear about drum carding for colour blending, and she was kind enough to let me use her carders and lots of her lovely coloured fibre for two days, and give me lots of helpful info in the use thereof.

As you can see Jill has a fair bit of fibre:

I had a fabulous time playing with it all, and was definitely getting better by the end of the second day, fewer lumps and feeding the fibre in more smoothly. I made 8 little skeins – they are each only abot 10 – 15g.

They are mostly merino, but a couple have silk in, and a couple trilobal nylon sparkle. My favourite is the green 3rd from the right. This is an optical illusion (which I dreamt up at 6am on the second day of the workshop!) and actually contains no green fibre, only yellow and cyan.

I loved it so much that I have ordered a drum carder as a birthday present to myself and am eagerly awaiting its arrival.

The mini skeins are all around 4ply weight, and I am planning on using them as the contrast colour in mittens.