Okay so when you sheer a sheep (I’m not 100% sure if she’s carding wool but i’m going to use it as an example as it’s still the basic idea) you don’t get nice locks of hair like with humans, you get a big old clump filled with dirt, oil, and god knows what else
Of course you wash that shit cause ewwww nasty. You can also dye it at this stage, so let’s do that cause we want some pretty yarn
Now we have to get it prepped for spinning! The problem is if we tried to spin it right now it wouldn’t work. All of the hair fibers are all in crazy directions and all knotted up so any yarn we spin would come out an absolute disaster that easily falls apart. But we can fix this via carding! Think of it like brushing your hair, but instead of a brush we’re using THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS OF NEEDLES cause we’re hardcore like that
It’s important to note that normally carding isn’t done so hands-on (although it does look fun) but used with either hand carders or carding machines
Carding, by the way, takes a long freakin’ time and a hell of a lot of arm muscle if you do it by hand. So of course in ye olden days they made children do it while the children’t weren’t busy dying or working in the mines or being stolen away by fae or something
But hey look! Thanks to all of that carding our fibers are now nice and neat and pointing in the same direction! Not only will it be far easier to spin, but it will be stronger too!
And thanks to the magic of this horribly drawn spinning wheel our fiber has turned into yarn! I am of course skipping a LOT of details and it’s way way way more complex and there’s all of this hand vs machine stuff but that’s the general gist of it
ForLoveFromFear 