PHEBE'S WORLD OF WOOL

Summer, 1998

Handspinning Tips for August, 1998

Interesting handspinning products I have come across lately:

Giant wooden ballwinder sold at the great Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. Handcrafted mainly of wooden parts. Large, tall center winder makes a HUGE ball of yarn, a pound at a time.

Antique carders: Seen at the home of collector Kim Little, breeder of Jacob sheep.

Handmade carding bench: a shoemaker-type bench with a fixed carder at one end and a matching carder with a regular handle to card wool against the fixed one.
Discontinued Louet wheeled carder-picker: base of wood and carding cloth about 18 inches, and another short card fixed on two large wheels that roll back and forth over the stationery bottom car. A sort of flat drum carder!

Silkwaste: an interesting blending fiber obtainable inexpensively from Woodland Wools. They don't have a web site, but their e-mail is woolwrks@teleport.com. Their phone number for orders is 1-800-547-3725. Silkwaste is a mush of short silk threads from cloth manufacturies in Switzerland. It looks like dryer lint or carpet padding because the many colored threads blend to neutral.

I mixed it with brown Jacob wool, which it softened and brightened because of the many little bright-colored threads; and with hot pink dyed Jacob wool which it calmed down to a dusty rose, as seen in the photo above. I was careful not to overblend the final batts so I wouldn't lose all the vitality of the hot pink.

Australian Landscape dye color "Bloodwood." Great name, great color. It is described as black magenta in the Woodland Wools catalog, and that is accurate, but vibrant deep grape would work too; it makes you thirsty to look at this color of wool on a hot day, the grape color is so striking.