Carding, plying, and dye failure.

Yesterday I went to visit some friends and use their drum carder. Since then, I'll have you know, I've ordered my own drum carder. A Brother drum carder. Excitement! Here are the batts I made yesterday.

The left is the heritage wool I'd been washing. It ended up being about an ounce and a quarter. The right is the alpaca/llama hybrid at three ounces.

Remember the brown and the ecru yarns I spun over the last few days? Well, I plied them. It looks nice enough, but wasn't what I was going for. The variations in the brown are all but lost. Oh well.

Another failure is the cabbage dye. Natural dyes and I aren't getting along these days. The truth is that I need to just buy some alum and get over myself. Of course, once I do this and still get sub par results I'll probably cry. Again, oh well. The light lavender/grey is just plain cabbage. The extremely faded-almost-teal-grey was with the addition of baking powder (because I didn't double check what I'd read - it should have been baking soda). It's stiff despite all of my rinsing. Right now it's soaking in extremely hot water. After this I'm likely to just give up.

And in case you think I never leave my world of wool. I've been working on a potential custom order of peg dolls. For the life of me, I can't draw a hairbrush.