#im combing more of this shetland per day than i was the southdown for sure | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

milkweedman · 11 months

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Genuinely spending 2 hours a day just prepping the fiber, RIP

To be fair at least a third of that time is pushing the executive function button so I can start the next nest. They're unfortunately one of those activities that has enough steps that each one feels like it's own separate thing, so I have to Start Task each damn time. So there's a 5-10 minute cooldown between them.

Got 9 nests, I think (on top), middle is some fleece that's already had a lot of locks picked out so it's kind of jumbled, bottom is combing waste.

#That's how all fiber prep is for me... I bet if I was actually medicated it'd go faster #but what can you do.#anyway ive done similar things. 2021 tdf i was carding rolags as i went #but those are so much faster !!! like 2 minutes at most and usually closer to 30 seconds for a rolag that takes #around the same amount of time to spin as a nest of top #meanwhile the nests are 10 minutes each IF i have already picked the locks. which ive started doing bc it feels a little faster #and earlier this year i was spending an hour to an hour and a half before work every day combing southdown babydoll for sock yarn #but i was also spinning that up on supported spindles (i spin 3x slower on those than on my wheel) and over the course #of like a 10+ hour shift #so it felt a lot more reasonable #im combing more of this shetland per day than i was the southdown for sure #but yeah it spins up so much faster that its like. whole morning: combing #tiny but nice part of afternoon: actually spinning the top #idk a ton about how ancient people prepared their wool... definitely need to find some info bc it would be fascinating to know #but carding cloth is a pretty recent development in the grand scale of how long humans have kept sheep #so.... yeah i can imagine youd need like 4 kids combing the wool just to keep up with one experienced spinner #or else that one spinner is spending all damn morning prepping wool #its not a great nighttime activity bc if you cant see real well then your prep really suffers #easier to spin in the near dark than prep in the near dark by a long shot #idk ! cool to think about #im rly intruiged by sally pointers video on that blackthorn hand hackle thing (i cant remember the name RIP)#feels like it could comb wool too ? or at least you could try and then make something better when that failed #but a comb of some kind is just gonna be the easiest thing to make if nothing else ...#palm comb #tour de fleece #tour de fleece 2023 #wool prep

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