I started with 4 oz of drum carded mohair I got from GLASG's Secretary, Loan Nguyen.
This is beautiful on its own, and Loan already spent the effort to drum card it, which is why I think what I did was wasteful. I had ideas other than just spinning it up for this pretty fiber.
I also had 1 oz of undyed 50/50 cashmere and silk just sitting around, and I wanted to blend the cashmere and silk in with the mohair. I first dyed the cashmere/silk into a pretty lavender color, then carded all of them together about 3 times. It was a process. The carder could only handle 1.25 oz of fiber at a time, so it took 4 batts to card up everything. I then layered the batts and fed them through the carder again. I did this twice. The result was kind of unexpected.
I expected a mild purple-ish blue color, since the mohair to cashmere to silk ratio was 8:1:1, but instead, the cashmere/silk color dominated the batt, so you could hardly tell there were 4 oz of light blue mohair in the batts. The batts ended up like this:
Here's an over exposed version:
Sorry, I need better lighting.
In any case, you can see there's hardly any blue left in the batt.
For now, my plan is to attempt brushed mohair yarn. The plan is to spin all the carded mohair/cashmere/silk into lace weight singles, WPI 60 or so, and spin up 5 oz of tencel into WPI 60 singles as well, then ply. After that, I will try brushing out the mohair with a slicker brush. If that doesn't work, maybe I will knit it up first then brush out the mohair.
Once I spin this up, I will post results.
Overall, drum carding was surprisingly simple and I didn't feel there's a need for extensive classes on how to drum card. I feel it's something you can just "wing it". All I had to remember was to not put too much fiber through the carder at one time. The batts I made, because they were carded over and over again very carefully, they are smooth like babies' butts. I'm rather excited about the idea of spinning them up.
