Thursday, November 27, 2014

Stating the obvious and elucidating the trivial.

Everyone knows the two dowel technique for rolling rolags off of a drum carder.

However, when one is spinning finer, one needs thinner rolags.

I use the steel doffer as one dowel and a steel gansey needle as the other. This makes a smaller, thinner rolag.  Even when the rolag has been wound rather tight, the gansey needle slides right out, giving enough slack for the doffer to easily slide out.

My rolags weigh just under 5 grams, these days I spin them into about 50 meters of single. The rolags below do not look very uniform, but they average out.

When I have spun 2 rolags, I have about 100 meters on the bobbin and  I wind off before the effective diameter of the bobbin changes too much.  When I have done 10 rolags, I know I have about a hank, and I rewind, measure, and weigh.


40 rolags with doffer and 
knitting needle use to make them

I am sure that EVERYONE else has already worked out this trick, but just forgot to post it so the rest of us would know how to wind a smaller rolag that works better for spinning fine.

I am still a little surprised at how fast the process goes.  Working from batts that have been carded twice, it only takes about half an hour to card and roll the 40 or so rolags needed for an afternoon's spinning.  The result is some 2,500 yards of 5,600 ypp woolen single in ~6 hours.



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