Roving, Wool, Fiber

Carding is the processing of brushing raw or washed fibers to prepare them as textiles. A large variety of fibers can be carded, anything from dog hair, to llama, to soy silk (a fiber made from soy beans). Cotton and wool are probably the most common fibers to be carded. more...

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Not all fibers are carded; Flax and bast, for example, is retted then threshed.

Though in general carding is used to take unordered fibers and prepare them for spinning, it can also be used to create blends of different fibers or different colors. The process of carding mixes up the different fibers, thus creating a homogeneous of the various types of fibers, at the same time as it orders them and gets rid of the tangles.

The two main ways to card fibers are by hand and by machine.

Hand carding

Hand carders look similar to dog brushes. They are used two at a time to brush the wool between them until all the fibers in a bunch align in the same direction more or less. Carding is an activity normally done sitting down outside or over a drop cloth, depending on the wool's cleanliness. If the wool contains a lot of vegetable matter, that will fall out during the carding process, which is the reason for a drop cloth. If the carding is being done to mix two pre-carded fibers, a drop cloth is not generally used.

To card, the person carding holds a carder in each hand. The carder in their non-dominant hand (left for most people) is rested on their leg. They place a small amount of fiber on this card and pull the other carder through, while taking care to catch some of the fibers. By catching some fibers on the moving card, the fibers are separated, which allows vegetable matter to fall out, and they are aligned. Catching too many fibers makes it hard to pull the carders apart. This process, repeated many times, transfers small amounts of the wool to the other carder. Once all the wool has been transferred, the person carding repeats this process until all the fibers are aligned and the fiber is satisfactorily clean of debris. They then roll up their carded wool into a neat rolag.

Hand carders come in a wide variety of sizes, from ones two by two inches to ones four by eight inches. The small ones are called flick carders, and are used just to flick the ends of a lock of hair, or to tease out some strands for spinning off of. The density of the teeth, and the shape of the carders also varies. For finely carded rolags, one uses carders with more teeth. The type of fiber, its length, weight and characteristics, can also determine how many teeth are wanted per inch on the carders. Hand carders can be either flat backed or curved, which is a matter of personal preference.

Machine carding

Machine carding is done on a device called a drum carder. These devices vary in size from the one that easily fits on the kitchen table, to the carder that takes up a full room .

Read more at Wikipedia.org