Prepping the Romney Combed Waste

Here's a photo of the Romney combed waste prepared for spinning.

I expected from the outset that, by using comb waste, I'd get a rather irregular and inconsistent spun yarn. The following are steps I took to compensate and get as smooth and strong a single as possible.

I picked out as many broken lock tips and little balls of short snarled fibres as I could. The point of combing is to leave tips and noils behind on the comb, so comb waste is peppered with them. Any left in will create slubs on the spun yarn and become pills on the final fabric.

I teased the remaining fibres very loosely into thin layers, stacked layers, and rolled them.

I ran into more than one clump of combed waste with very short fibres left from an initial pass with the comb. I made a layer of the short fibres. I took a clump with a longer fibres and made a layer out of that clump. I put one over the other and rolled the layers up to distribute the fibres throughout.

The first photo shows undyed fibres. Doesn't the layer's thinness and the dark background show off the missed noils in the centre nicely? In the second photo you can see the mishmash of dyed fibres.