Blending Board

Another long blogging break…  but a new toy brings me back with pictures.  I recently purchased a blending board.  They are a sort of cross between giant hand carders a drum carder – you can fit more fibre on them than hand carders but they are not as heavy or large as a drum carder.

There are endless ways that you could apply fibre to the board, I picked a range of different bits of fibres in a range of different blue/green/purple colourways and added them in thin stripes:

Eventually they made a thick layer on the board:

The board comes with two dowels, like giant DPNs – I pinched the fibre between them and started rolling and pulling the fibre up, away from the board:

I experimented with making one huge fat rolag, but decided it was more manageable to make two or three smaller ones by breaking the fibre after a few rolls of the dowel:

Eventually all the fibre had been used:

I then had a load of pretty rolags to experiment with:

I chain plied the yarn and ended up with an aran-ish weight yarn, about 200 yards:

I am enjoying using this board, it does ‘what it says on the tin’ and lets you blend different fibres together.  I know my drum carder would also do the job, but the board is is just less cumbersome and less noisy to use. It is also rather addictive, all those bits of random fibre and being dusted off and combined to make multicoloured blends!