- 1). Make sure your cat is clean before you brush or trim its fur. Collect at least enough to fill a plastic grocery bag. Remember that fur collected from brushing will be easier to spin as it has a longer staple or hair length.
- 2). Card the fur with the hand carders. If you are using cut fur or fur less than 2 inches long, to make spinning easier you may want to add a bit of wool roving, large balls of animal fiber that have yet been spun. Carders are two large brushes swept back and forth in your hands to create roving. Lay the cat hair over the brush in your left hand and sweep the right brush over it until you have an equal amount on both cards. Take care to line up the fibers in straight rows. Continue brushing back and forth until you have a sheet of fiber you can peel off.
- 3). Remove the fiber carefully from the carder brush. With the fiber facing up, roll it gently off the brush in the direction of the handle, keeping the fibers parallel. Collect as many clumps of fiber as you need to spin your desired length of yarn.
- 4). Start spinning. Pull a small piece of fiber about 5 inches long from the carded roving and tie or tape it to the end of the spindle. Start spinning slowly, feeding the roving a tiny bit at a time in a continuous string. Twist slightly as you go. Cat hair is very fine and will require a lot of twisting to hold together. It's better to spin a thin yarn and ply if you desire a DK (double-knitting) weight or heavier. Yarn made from cat hair felts very easily, so you may prefer to felt the skein before knitting so it doesn't felt as you work with it. Tie each thin skein with eight pieces of scrap yarn and agitate in hot water with a small amount of laundry detergent.
- 5). Dunk felted yarn in cold water to "full" or harden it slightly. Make sure all detergent is rinsed out, then slap the skein against a hard surface a few times to fluff it out. Ply the yarn, twisting multiple strands together on a single spindle, if a bulkier weight is desired.
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