Carding and Dyeing Our Wool

A couple weeks ago, we ordered a drum carder to help us card all of the fleece that we sheared from our 8 merino sheep (the lambs have a whole year before they are sheared!)

After washing the wool in the bathtub, letting it dry for a few days outside (or in a spare bedroom), we have to pick it apart to pull out all the small second cuts of wool and get the extra vegetable matter (hay and plants) out of the wool.  Then it is ready to be fed into the hand-turned drum carder and made into a light wool batt.

The batt is white fluffy thing at the top of the photo and then we pull it into roving and twist it into a ball.

Over the last few weekends, we have been playing around with dyeing our wool with Kool-Aid!

You just add your wool and a packet of Kool-Aid to a pot of almost-boiling water and keep it at the same temperature for about half an hour or until the water is clear and all the dye is in the wool.

Look at the bright, vibrant colors we were able to get from the Kool-Aid!  Here is some of the freshly dyed wool drying on a clothes-drying rack in our kitchen.  The blue is my favorite so far.  After it dries, we put it back on the drum carder to fluff it up a bit more.