Wetaskiwin District Heritage Museum Centre & City of Wetaskiwin Archives

The Heritage Museum would like to share this carding bench we received recently. Emanuel Nelson made it in the 1930s for his mother, Ingeborg Nelson. It was then passed down to the donor’s mother, Bertha Blakely. A handful of wool was placed on the carder; the handle would then be pushed back and forth to straighten the fiber and create blocks, which were made into quilts. Carding fiber prepared it for the optimal position before spinning, and until the mid-1700, hand carding using one of these machines was the only way to complete the task effectively. The practice of carding fiber changed when Lewis Paul, in 1738, invented the earliest mechanical device for carding, which was not patented until August 1748. The same year Daniel Bourn had obtained a patent for a machine with four carding rollers, the first of its kind. Bourn and Paul’s inventions laid the basis for future carding machines and ultimately led to carding benches being less common in practice. The bench is viewable in the County of Wetaskiwin exhibit on the lowest level of the building.