Gabrielle Sets Up Her Mill

Gabrielle says,

"13-months ago, I paid a 75% deposit on the equipment to set-up my mill. I was told that it would take 4-months for the parts to be ready for assembly. (The carder cloth/rollers came from England.) We scheduled our mill installation for "the end of May." After several delays, our engineer finally assembled the equipment. Here are pictures from the first few runs.







First run through the carder is a small amount of my dark brown/charcoal colored merino, "Ramington Steele," 19 micron. (He changed colors throughout the year.) After this small section, we ran a nice size batt of his fleece.









The carder is "self-cleaning." Just 15-minutes after I ran the dark brown merino, I ran Grade 4 (26 - 28.9 micron) white alpaca, with no color contamination happening from the merino. It is splitting into two slivers and coiling into the bucket.




My dad watches the fluffy and lofty alpaca sliver feed into the pin drafter. The pin drafter evens out the sliver and makes the fibers more parallel to each other, making for a denser roving.



My third run was 50% merino "Ramington Steele" with 50% angora (the groomings from our rabbits.) This is it picked and feeding into the carder.

The 50/50 angora/merino blend feeding out the front end of the card into sliver. (We spinners call it roving. But, technically, it's called "sliver.") I was expecting a lot of clumps and lumps and matts because there were matts in the groomings that I was feeding into the machine. But... it did an amazing job!!"