Tuesday, January 31, 2012

First Art Batt

In the world of spinning, a batt is wadded blanket or sheet of fiber that has been prepared on a drum carder.  You can see photos of the process at the Joy of Hand Spinning. The last of the three photos on their webpage shows a solid-colored batt being lifted from the drum carder.

While some batts are composed of solid-colored fiber, others have multiple colors blended together. The wildest of the multiple colored batts are referred to as art batts. I just bought my first one.


It had tons of wonderful colors, with a preponderance of lavender and turquoise. There were lovely textural nubs of wool, pieces of metallic, and other lovely bits to wind up in the yarn. My spinning process was more loosey-goosey than normal because I wanted a wild thick and thin ply.

Here are some other little bits that got spun into the art batt fiber: pieces of lace, tattered hunks of rayon fabric, strands of handspun yarn leftover from other projects, eyelash yarn, and more. The color tone of this batch of extras was most deep blues and royal purple.



Because I wanted to end up with a little more yarn than the batt would provide another ply of mostly a solid media aqua Merino was spun. This one was done with more evenness and about 10% of the original batt was held back to combine here and there.




The result was a fun skein of one-of-a-kind yarn:

Next post, I'll show you what I made of it.

4 comments:

Ate said...

Hallo,
ich bin sehr gespannt, was man aus solch einem Garn machen kann. Gestern sah ich ein Video, in dem gezeigt wird, wie ein Batt auf einem hackle erzeugt wird. Viel Erfolg. Liebe Grüße von Ate

Sharon said...

For you blog readers who do not read German, Google translates kreativa's comment as " Hello, I'm very excited about what you can do with such a yarn. Yesterday I saw a video that is shown in which, like a batt is produced on a hackle. Much success. Best wishes from Ate"

To which I respond:
Ja, es ist spannend, mit einem solchen batt Arbeit!
(Yes, it is exciting to work with such a batt!)

Madara said...

Wow, cre-at-ive! Congrats on such work, I would be proud of it. Love colors and texture!

Katie said...

I am in fiber heaven!! xo