Mama is all washed and looking sparkly white. There was still a little hay and dirt mixed in her clean wool, but with a little fluffing (pulling apart the big locks/clumps of wool), she was soon on her way to the carder.
I love having a screened table to do all this so the dirt falls through and collects on a plastic sheet below. Fluffing/picking outside works just fine as well though, especially if you have a slight breeze to help carry off the dirt.
I run everything through the Louet drum carder first. Hard to get a working picture of this by myself (Blossom's good, but not that good...yet ;-), but just imagine I'm putting the picked/fluffed up locks under the lower drum and using a handle on the side to turn everything so it ends up brushed out on the bigger drum.
Disregard that straggly piece of wool on the top of the small drum. Nothing behaves on this farm ;-). The wool actually goes under the small drum and up between the two drums to wrap around the bigger one.
After I've loaded up the big drum, I use an ice pick sort of tool to slip through that groove to loosen the wool and then peel it off (you can sort of see that in a picture below).
I ran Mama through one time, pulled it off, separated out the batt (what comes off - looks like a fluffy pillow) into four pieces, pulled the pieces out into thinner/longer strips (wouldn't it be nice if I'd included a video to explain this garbley gook?) and then ran it back through the Louet carder a second time.
I repeated that and then ran it once more, this time through the finer (wire teeth closer together) Strauch carder.
Here's what it looks like as it peels off. Again, not a super informative photo, but hopefully you get an idea.
I separated the batt out into thinner strips, rolled them into "danishes" and Mama is ready to spin!*
*Disclaimer - this is just how I do it and may not be the "right" way. Feel free to jump in any time with some clarification or corrections. We're all here to learn!
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