How To Card Angora Fiber
Patti shows you how to use hand carders to prepare your angora fiber for spinning
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Step 1:
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Basket of Angora
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So, I've got my basket of angora here, and I'm just going to grab a clump of it. I don't want to take too much. I'm going to be hand carding the angora and these are the Ashford hand carders.
They have a fine needle carding cloth here and what I do with the angora is I just start on the bottom and I continue moving it across and filling in the rest of the hand carder.
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Step 2:
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Transfer The Angora
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Now I don't want to use too much on the brush here and now I'm just starting at the bottom and really transferring the angora on to the other brush here and the goal in carding and hand carding is to really line up the fibers together in a row and make them all parallel to each other.
So that right there, that's the first past. Now I want to keep doing it again. I like doing it at least three times. So when I've got a good quality fiber to start with, I can get away with just carding it and transferring it from brush to brush three times.
I'm basically just starting at the bottom and transferring one brush to the other and now see, that's left pretty much small fibers. You want the fibers to be at least three inches in length and that will just make the yarn that much easier to spin and more uniform and just that much better.
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Step 3:
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Increased Consideration
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So this is my second time. As I'm going through I'm looking and I'm being aware, ok, are there any vegetable matter such as hay or is there any kind of dirt or flecks of whatever that I don't want in the yarn. So that was the second pass, now I'm going to do the third pass.
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Step 4:
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Smooth It Up
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Ok, so that was the third time around. I'm going to do it one more time to just get it really nice and smooth on the brush.
Ok, what I'm going to do to take it off this brush to make a little rollage is I'm going to lay it down facing up and I'm going to take the bottom fiber here that's not on the handle side and roll the fiber off of the hand carder and then put it aside.
For this baby hat, I really don't need that much yarn, so I'm just going to spin up enough for two bobbin fulls and then I'm going to ply those two together.