I got a pair of carders for 10 bucks at the same place I got my spinning wheel.  They looked pretty beat up, but they still worked.

Sort of.

When I bought that pile of alpaca with Vegetable Matter in it, I thought, "Well, I’ll just card it out."  And a lot of the straw did come out with the carding.  And the spinning.  But I’m weaving it now, and there’s still a little straw in the weft.

So I decided to send off the carding pads to Howard Brush, and get new ones.

This is a great, old-fashioned company.  Turns out my carders were manufactured by them in the 30’s or so, and this is what they told me about the stamp that’s on the backs.

Yours were manufactured for L. S. Watson & Co. of
Leicester, MA and reads as follows, top to bottom:

The
only genuine
Old Whitmore Patent
Improved #8 Wool

followed by the Watson name.

When we purchased the company, we found several hundred of these wooden
backs with various names printed/stenciled on
them, as far back as the early 19^th century.
These were generally used in an industrial application for cleaning fiber from
rolls of large carding machines, when changing over to different colors or
fleeces.  A 54 TPI or 72 TPI were used for this purpose.

Neat, huh?  I got replacement pads at a finer gauge, because I’m going to be carding alpaca and other fine things, I think.  No sheep around here.

And just in time for Festival on the Green!