Loxosceles

(This is a post by guest star Chris Lansdown, Beth's husband)

Pleasantly, using wool combs is substantially easier than making them. To comb wool, you'll need three pieces of equipment besides your comb:

1. A table or other flat surface, around waist-hight.
   
2. A Clamp (better two) that won't mark your combs or the table.
   
3. Some wool, preferably locks that are either quite clean or have been flicked open. If you've washed them (which is a good idea), you should either wash them with a little bit of hair conditioner or spray them very lightly with olive oil.
   

First, clamp one of the wool combs to the table, with the tines just sticking off of the end and facing up. (You may want to notify anyone else in your living space to be careful.)

Next, load up the clamped comb with wool. You'll want to load it up about halfway, or to around the top of the shortest tines. Pack the wool in somewhat, but not to the point of being firm. You're now ready to start combing your wool.

Hold the free comb firmly near the head, tines pointing sideways, and towards the center (of your body). It doesn't matter which hand you hold them in; I suggest that you use your dominant hand. Pass the comb in your hand sideways past the clamped comb so that the teeth of the comb go through the tips of the wool. If you pull out any large locks, it just means that the lock wasn't seated on the teeth of the comb very well, so take it off and re-seat it on the clamped comb. You should only pull small bits of wool off with the comb in your hand. Repeat this passing motion with your comb, moving closer to the clamped comb as you transfer more of the wool from the clamped comb to the comb in your hand. Eventually, you'll have all but a very small amount of wool on the comb in your hand.

Put that comb down, and pick the remaining wool off of the clamped comb. This wool is going to be fairly short and/or matted. Put it in a pile of discard wool to be carded later (or used for stuffing, felting, etc).

You're now going to transfer the wool from the comb in your hand back into the clamped comb. You do this with vertical strokes, making the ends of the wool pass over the upright tines. (Keep the comb in your hand in the same orientation; the tines of the two combs should always be at right angles to each other.) Again, make the passes closer to the tines as more of the wool is transfered. Again, once you've got virtually all of the wool transfered, remove what's left and put it in the card/other use pile.

Repeat this process, back and forth, until you're satisfied. I generally find that 6-8 transfers (total) works pretty well. When you're satisfied, end with the wool transfered onto the clamped comb (now you see why those were even numbers).

The final step is to draft the wool off of the clamped comb into a sliver. This is probably the trickiest step of the combing process — thankfully, it's a lot like doing a short-draw draft while spinning, only bigger. Grasp the very ends of the wool sticking out of the comb so that you'll pull evenly from the entire comb. Now pull so as to draft some of the fiber out. Once you've drafted about 3/4 or so of a staple length, bring your other hand in to continue the drafting. Once you're close to another 3/4 of a staple length out, let go with your first hand and grasp the wool to continue drafting. Keep doing this until you've gotten virtually all of the wool off of the comb. You will have a tiny amount of carding/other use wool left, just like with the transfers, which, like them you should put into that discard pile. You will now have a sliver of combed top, which you'll generally want to be around 2 feet long. It doesn't much matter, but for the amount of wool that you can load onto one of these combs, I find that 2 feet long corresponds to a reasonable thickness. By all means vary this to taste. You're now ready to comb more wool.

If you want to be fancy, you can wind your slivers into a ball, or you can just store them laid on top of each other. If you wind them into a ball, try to twist them very slightly as you're wrapping so as to give the top some strength during the wrap (so you can pull on it to get it out of the ball without breaking the top). I find that you don't need to do much to join the ends. One method is to overlap the ends by a few inches, then holding the top on either side of the overlap (so that you just have both pieces in each hand), draft it until the overlap section is the same thickness as the rest. This will homogenize the ends a bit and make it more of a continuous strip of top. That plus the twisting and the staying in a ball for a while before use will usually make the joins strong enough to spin the entire top without having to break it.

Have fun!