Spinning Sheep Fiber Farm raises purebred, heritage Finnsheep.  After shearing, wool is sent to a family owned mill, where it is turned into combed top, roving, or batts.  There are differences in each of these products based on the preparation of the wool.

A true combed top, not just a commercial top, is a preparation in which all the fibers are parallel, smoothed down into the yarn with the air squeezed out of it, and no twist in the drafting zone.  Commercial combed top is a variant of this.  The fibers are all going the same direction, but there’s more of them and it actually feels fairly different from spinning a true combed top. 

Roving is a carded product, so the fibers are not all parallel as in a combed top.  Although in long ropes liked combed top, the difference in fiber arrangement is quite different.

A batt is also a carded product with fiber arrangement like that in roving.  Batts can be small, produced on a small drum carder, or quite large, blanket-sized, when produced on the machines at a fiber mill.

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