We traded our goat herd in for sheep for several reasons, mainly because marketing was easier, more sheep auctions closer to home. My husband wanted to tan the hides of the ones we butchered for ourselves, fleece on, to make soft throws and rugs but never got around to it, other more pressing projects always taking precedence. Instead the hides were, and still are, tossed onto the roof of the dog kennels so the birds can pick at the fat. But I, being the homemaker part of the bargain, wanted to do something with the wool. I only managed to complete one project using wool the whole time we've had sheep.
When I got pregnant I figured I should learn to knit. In my thinking that's what mother-to-be were supposed to do. I made one jumpsuit that fit my son when he was 2 and one sweater that was too small when he was born. So I had already determined that knitting wasn't my strong point. Besides I had no spinning wheel or drop spindle, and had no clue how to spin except in circles. As luck would have it, our local hall hosted the answer for me to use my wool - a quilting course!
It was important for me to take it from the fleece to the quilt, so the first thing I did was take the newly shorn wool down to our lake to wash it. Wet wool is mighty difficult to handle but I got it all sorta washed and onto an old bed spring to dry in the sun. I borrowed some combs and a hand crank drum carder (see below) from a friend and bit by bit cranked away at the fleece until it became rectangles (batts) of combed wool, reasonably devoid of straw and weeds. I was nearly ready!
But I needed some material squares for my quilt cover and a simple design to arrange them in. Our local thrift shop had all I required so I snipped and sorted till I had something I figured looked pretty nice, then sewed the quilt cover with my old treadle sewing machine. It was looking pretty good! I was ready to take the course. The instructor had never before encountered someone who wanted to make a quilt with real wool, most folks use perfectly uniform synthetic quilt batting, but she rose to the challenge and we made only one change - we added a layer of cheese cloth over the wool. My treadle did itself proud (though it has never been quite the same since - went out of sync somehow due to the thickness of the wool) and before too long I had the quilted part of the quilt ready for the backing. Our quilts were sized so that a bed-sheet backing should fit just right...but when I pinned it on IT DIDN'T FIT! For some reason it was about 4 inches too short.
By this time I was getting pretty tired of looking at that quilt. It had been a long and, for me, difficult process. When that sheet didn't fit I just groaned. I rolled the darn thing up, put it in a large garbage bag and stuffed it under my bed. Never looked at it again for several years until one day I got the courage, took it out, refitted the sheet and sewed it all together. That quilt stayed on our bed for many years, even after a dry cleaner made it go all lumpy. It was hard for me to retire it. After all I was pretty proud of my fleece to quilt accomplishment. But it did have one wee flaw. Some of the long straight pins that held the backing on before I sewed it had worked their way deep into the wool. All were found eventually, one sharp reminder at a time!
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From Wikipedia
Carding is a mechanical process that disentangles, cleans and intermixes fibers to produce a continuous web or sliver suitable for subsequent processing. This is achieved by passing the fibers between differentially moving surfaces covered with card clothing. It breaks up locks and unorganized clumps of fiber and then aligns the individual fibers to be parallel with each other. In preparing wool fiber for spinning, carding is the step that comes after teasing.
The word is derived from the Latin carduus meaning thistle or teasel, as dried vegetable teasels were first used to comb the raw wool. These ordered fibers can then be passed on to other processes that are specific to the desired end use of the fiber: Cotton, batting, felt, woollen or worsted yarn, etc.
The simplest machine carder is the drum carder. Most drum carders are hand-cranked but some are powered by electric motor. These machines generally have two rollers, or drums, covered with card clothing. The licker-in, or smaller roller meters fiber from the infeed tray onto the larger storage drum. The two rollers are connected to each other by a belt - or chain-drive - so that the their relative speeds cause the storage drum to gently pull fibers from the licker-in. This pulling straightens the fibers and lays them between the wire pins of the storage drum's card cloth. Fiber is added until the storage drum's card cloth is full. A gap in the card cloth facilitates removal of the batt when the card cloth is full.
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