Like a Batt out of hell

I decided to blend some coloured fibres with my plain merino tops I had. Two Christmas' ago I got a box of what I think is 10g of merino in a variety of colours. I have used them for needle felting in the past but I thought it was a great idea to blend some into some of my white merino. Its also a great excuse to use my new drum carder.

So I broke off a small amount of white and carded that, I then selected the four colour I wanted to add to spice things up. I thought I would go for a 'My little pony' them, so I chose turquoise, blue, pink and some yellow.

 I put the colours through the carder in an order of white then colour, white then colour etc. but I was only using a little bit of colour.

This is what it looked like after one pass....

But I decided I would do a second pass. For this I broke the batt into six pieces, I made sure I spread the fibres out before I passed the pieces through again. Here is how it looked after the second pass through...

 Much more blended. I have never spun from a batt so I want to make it like the tops I usually spin from. To do this I spilt the batt in a 'W' kind of shape.

I then drafted it all out the make it smoother and so the fibre were all more or less going the same way.

Finally I then wound it into a ball ready for me to spin later on.

SO happy with it! Will do some more next week I think! But before I can spin it I need to ply these!

I LOVE the colour of them and CANNOT wait for the yarn to be finished!!!