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Friday, January 29, 2010

A Bit of Ouch for My Trouble

This little instrument of torture is my flicker: You can see it lying on a bed of white fluff--that's my reward for a couple of hours of effort with it. I am bearing a few wounds for my effort as well. Those little bent wires are quite sharp!

To use the flicker I have to hold a small amount of fleece in my left hand and flick at it with the brush held in the other hand. I have to hold the fleece fairly hard between my thumb and fingers. Inevitably the soft part of my thumb sometimes gets in the way. Did I mention those little wires are sharp! I don't want blood on my lovely fine white merino wool, so I'm taking a break before I start spinning. Then the challenge is to see how finely I can spin. I chose the flicker because it prepares the fibre quite well, even though it's a little torturous.

2 comments:

Knitspingirl said...

I tend to use a dog comb instead of my flicker for that exact reason! I now only use my flicker for cleaning out the teeth of my drum carder (much less painful)

Chiara Z said...

I'm with you! Only that I preferred the quality of the preparation from the flicker on the samples I did before.