Weaving a Woolen Rug

We get a lot of colorful wool from our Icelandic sheep and I wanted to see if we could make a rug with it.  The first step was to card it into bats. 

A drum carder has two different sized rollers with metal teeth very similar to those on a dog brush.  The first roller pulls the wool into the carder where it catches on the larger drum.

Periodically I hold a hand carder against the large drum to pack in the wool fibers.

Once the drum was loaded I break off a lock of wool at the edge of the drum.

I thread the wool through a 5/8" hole in a small piece of wool.

As you pull on the wool the top of the drum turns away from you (counterclockwise from this end) and a strip of wool peels off  in a long strip called roving.

I imagine that a good spinner would know how to peel the wool from the drum in a uniformly thick band of roving, but I am just a hack and for our purposes uniformity is not critical, so my roving is very irregular.

But it nevertheless passed inspection by the quality control officer.

This is my spinning wheel, a cordless drill.  

Here is the loose roving.

Here's how it looks as you spin it.

Marja gradually releases the twist into the unspun roving as I backed up with the drill.  I know that this method that would cause a real spinner to blanch, but we had a lot of wool and needed a fast way to spin it into heavy yarn to weave into a carpet.

Spinning is an ancient art and was done with primitive tools for millennia, but whoever first devised it gave mankind one of the greatest technologies ever invented, one that unlike so many others, has been used primarily for peaceful, good purposes.  The loose roving has virtually no tensile strength whatsoever, it can be pulled apart effortlessly; but once spun, it turns into a very strong yarn.

We then looped the single strand around a chair  to double it.

I joined the ends in a half-knot and Marja slowly twisted the double strand in the direction it wanted to twist.

The tension in the twists of the doubled strand cause it to naturally twist into a rope.  Voila, there you have it....

Weft to weave a rug.

Yes, I know it is lumpy and not at all uniform in thickness.

But all those lumps and irregularities can be woven into something beautiful...

....if it is woven with happiness...

...and attention to detail....

...with a good quality control inspector on hand.