Buying an extra hand
I do sometimes have three hands when it comes to carding, child labour is very useful but the problem with it is that he does disappear off to school during daylight hours. When I have an assistant he turns the handle and I feed the fibre in and occasionally run the brush over the main drum. Using the brush means that you get more fibre on the drum and it encourages those fly away bits to go where they should. When I only have my own two hands then I use the brush less because I still have to feed the fibre in and turn the handle and I can’t do everything.
Those clever people at Ashford have eliminated the need for the third hand because if you buy a drum carder now they come with a packer brush fitted. For those of us with older models you can buy it as an accessory to retro fit. This comes in a small box that is identical to the one on top of the heap of stuff in my last post. It comes with a spanner to loosen the two bolts on the carder that are already there (the ones that alter the drum spacing), then the brackets slip under the bolts and the brush sits on the bracket. Even if you are hopeless with a spanner it still takes only a few minutes to fit.
Do you get the impression that I like it? The brush sits against the drum all of the time without me needing to hold it and the result is that my batts are bigger and they take less time to make. It is a big improvement over the wallpaper brush and I wish I’d had one sooner. What am I going to do with all those batts? Some I sell, some I swap and some I spin. 
The latter might come as a surprise because the blog certainly hasn’t been seeing much in the way of spinning recently but that doesn’t mean that it’s not been happening. I dye something or card it then spin it and never think of photographing it at any stage. I think the group shot is proof that I’m not quite over my orange period yet. I thought I’d moved on but after a brief diversion into blue and grey I slipped back to orange again. I think this also demonstrates that I will be needing to get a grip on the yarn stash during the course of the year.
