I love sandwiches!

It's been a while since I blogged about anything fibrey and yet most of my free time is taken up with fibre related activities at the moment.  I am a breath away from launching my website ( I know that I have said this before) and my yarns and batts have been quite popular at the guild and other venues.  So much so, that I have been struggling to keep items for the website, a great problem to have really.

Batt at the bottom, the fibre layers on top

So I have been carding and carding and then the other day I thought I had better do some fibre sandwiches.  You get such a different look from spinning from a sandwich. As the name implies it's layers of fibre placed down by hand one on top of the other.  However as in the food variety sandwich there is a process to making a good one.

I firstly put down a fine batt of fibre as a base for the sandwich (like the bread really) and then I place the filling which is layers of different varieties of fibre on top.  I like to colour co-ordinate, and also lay the fibres in the same direction so it makes it easier to pull off when you spin.

Sandwiches have had some rough press, and really the early creators of this method have brought it on themselves.  It was  marketed as a way of getting rid of fibre that you didn't like, and it didn't matter what colour it was, as that was the 'fun' of a sandwich, you didn't know what you were going to spin.  Oh yes, I have taken home a pulled off,  hotch potch of fibre, spent my time spinning it and then found out I got the same result as when I took all the colours of my painting set, as a child, and mixed them up — a muddy brown.  

As for the fibre, quality in, quality out! I have never had the magic sandwich moment, when all of my rough dull scrappy fibres suddenly transformed from being in the 'filling'.

Final layers

The benefits of a sandwich made in a thoughtful way is that after stretching out the batt (bread), layering your fibre (filling) out in layers with fibre going in the same direction as the batt, you can roll it up (fibres running along the length) like a swiss roll — full of food metaphors today.  You can either pull off handfuls of fibre from the end or hold the whole roll under your arm and just draft off the end.  The resulting yarn has the opportunity to be more textured and defined colour-wise. It is also the perfect method of carrying your fibres in one 'organised' bundle and great for those who don't have a carding machine.

All rolled up

Yummy filling inside and it's ready to spin!

As you might have gathered I am very partial to a sandwich!  This one just begging to be spun by me.