Wool combs

Now I have a pair of wool combs to go with my hackle!

Home-made wool combs. The one on the left is unfinished. The one on the right is as good as it's going to get.

They weigh a pound each and are rather scary. Viking minicombs they ain't. But with the hackle clamped to the dining table (which incidentally is not doing it any good) you can use both hands if necessary to swing a comb. You need to be careful to avoid combing downwards because your knees are in that direction and you really don't want to comb your knees.

My first attempts at combing fleece looked like a real bird's nest, but by the fourth attempt they were starting to look like proper fleecy "nests" of roving. Not gossamer-fine yet, I found out that that's why you need the diz. Damn! I haven't got a diz. I have a broken Yale key though. (Thanks, son!) Broken Yale keys work very well as dizzes. After dizzing the roving is.....quite fine. (Must take photo). Fine and easy to spin. Mwahahahahaaaaa!

Feeling rather smug, proceeded to give husband a tutorial on short-draw spinning on my Ashford traditional. Husband was politely baffled. His spinning wheel is home-made (did you expect anything else?) and you spin directly onto the spindle, as on a Great Wheel. Scotch tensioning might as well be witchcraft as far as he is concerned.

Explained to husband that the best way for him to keep his loom (home-made rigid heddle, 32" wide) supplied with warp is for him to spin long wools, short draw, then cable-ply them. Husband gave me a Look, and explained he was fully occupied spinning weft (short wools, long draw) for the project that is currently on his loom (using commercial weft, which works very nicely thank you very much) and that he is not about to change sheep in midstream. 

Getting to grips with my hackle

My husband made me a hackle yesterday. He makes most of my spinning and weaving equipment. Mostly it's equipment that I've never used, and he has never even seen, so the Mark I prototypes can be fairly weird. The hackle seems straightforward though, a sturdy piece of wood with some wicked pointy nails in it.

First learning point: it doesn't like fleeces that are felty. My Romney and my Herdwick are a bit felted, and it isn't a miracle worker.  Nor does it like my very fine, crimpy BFL/Leicester long wool lamb's fleece. So it's the compost bin for the first two, and the dog combs for the third.

Second learning point: for a beginner the bendy rubber dog comb is safer than a proper wool comb. I was taking all sorts of liberties that I'm sure a real wool comb wouldn't have let me get away with.

Third learning point: I can only do so much before my muscles get stiff and achey. A ball of sock yarn would take me a week on today's showing. Then again, if I hadn't wasted so much energy on terminally felted fleece, I could have combed a lot more of the downs wool (staple length 3", just about enough as it turned out).

Fourth learning point: it seemed to make very little difference whether I used a diz or not to pull the roving off into long narrow strips, which I wound into nests.

Fifth learning point: I still haven't got the hang of a short forward draw.

My husband is now feeling ready to graduate from pine to proper grown-up hardwood. We found a DIY store in our town which sells hardwood, and bought a short plank of something unpronouncable. Also a large bag of very scary nails. I'm hoping these will become a set of wool combs at some point.



My big Christmas present this year was a fleece picker, again home-made, and again we've neither of us ever seen a "real" one. It's fun to use, but it is REALLY hard on the arm and shoulder muscles, and I can only do a handful of fleece about the size of a clown wig at a time. It does open up fleece nicely though, to about snow shower thickness that is then easy to card.

I'm a bit puzzled about where to store it, as it's the size of a small suitcase and about as heavy. Come to think of it, storing it in a suitcase might be a good safety measure.