On the heels of my last post, more about prepping fibers using the drum carder.  I bought some gorgeous, unbelievable cloud-like dyed alpaca fiber from North Star Alpacas.  Here it is (well, what's left of it).  I plan to spin this bit from the locks into a puffy cloud yarn of some sort:

Here's what happened when I separated the colors and added it to some gorgeous Coopworth roving I bought from Hatchtown Farm at Rhinebeck last fall.  I layered it on the drum carder, then split each batt into 4 pieces, fluffed them out and ran them through a second time. The blend is about 1/3 Coopworth and 2/3 Alpaca, soft and light as air.

And then I made some more, smaller batts from the same fibers, though I was not as precise on the percentage of wool and alpaca in these since I was running out of the Coopworth.  I turned these batts into roving with a method I saw on a great YouTube video that I can't find now, aargh.  I made my own diz using a chinese soup container lid and my hole puncher (how thrifty!).  I loosened about an inch width of the batt at one one edge and pulled the fibers off the large drum an inch or so at a time, through the diz.  These should spin up with no pre-drafting or other prep, which is a huge plus in my book.  Who knew you could make your own roving this easily:

I can't wait to see the different yarns I get from these three preparations.  I will add photos of the yarns to this post when I've spun each one up.