Mix It Up: Spinning With Carding Waste

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Carding waste – I nearly threw it on the compost heap. I’d been spinning some hand-dyed fleece and was left with the shorter fibres. The little matted blobs and generally unhelpful stuff that was making spinning frustrating. I didn’t quite know what to do with it, but kept it for a while and hovered over the compost heap with it one day.

But I couldn’t quite throw it in. I’m not good at throwing anything textile-related away.  I’m an ardent recycler. It occurred to me that perhaps I could mix it in with some other carded fleece, but hadn’t got around to trying it. Then I came across some blog posts over at Local and Bespoke. They showed some rather becoming trash batts which use carding waste so I thought I would give it a go.

Zero Waste Textiles

Spinning with carding waste is one of my zero waste tactics. It’s one for the committed crafter that I mentioned in Clothes from scraps: Zero waste clothes. In fact one of the best ways to make clothes from scraps is to mix it up – fabric, yarn and fibres.

It has taken me some time to get round to it, but it is an activity that fits nicely in to small slots of time which is all I have had lately. As usual I spun this on a drop spindle.

I have a spinning wheel, a flax wheel, but I have limited space in which to use it at the moment. It isn’t ideal for spinning wool, so I migrate back to the trusty little spindles that live in a bag, always next to my favourite chair.

Larger projects (like curtains) have been somewhat on and off as well.

Tweedy Affect From Carding Waste

I was aiming for a tweedy grey, using the grey Ryeland fleece that I have in copious quantity. My results were more variegated than tweedy, but still, I would happily knit it up. The colour comes from a blue woad dyed fleece and a rusty orange, dyed [I think] with onion skin on copper mordant. I find labeling up my dye samples comes in handy, but in this case the label had dropped off.

I decided to knit the yarn into a beret, with single line stripes of the rusty orange. It’s a pattern I made up myself. I’d rather that than rifle through all the patterns I have to find one that would fit the wool gauge. This is approximately dk or worsted thickness.

I was aiming for something a little larger and floppier, so perhaps I was knitting a little tight, but here it is. It might end up with a pom pom on the top….