Loopgram: How to hook with palm spun roving

I have been promising for months to post on how to hook with palm spun roving. I learned how to do this from a spinner at a yarn shop who sold me roving and gave me an old pair of carding paddles to help with the process.

I was intent on hooking roving to create a ram as the central figure of my rug Got Wool? I had no idea what I was doing when I started, but I discovered that I love hooking with roving and will probably do another piece one day since the ram turned out so well. The texture is beyond belief.

The first thing you do is take a bit of roving and spread it out in your left palm. Then put your right hand over top and briskly move your hands back and forth so that the roving begins to felt into a slender piece of yarn. Add a little more roving to the end and briskly felt another piece onto the end of the first. In this way you can extend the roving into a piece of yarn as long as you wish to hook with. It helps to begin wrapping it into a ball.

Want to mix colors so you can shade and blend rovings? Easy to do. Just take one of the carding paddles and run one of the colors of roving in between the teeth. On top of this layer another color of roving. Then put the other paddle on top and without locking the teeth pull the top paddle to the right. Continue until you have blended the rovings together. Do this until the roving is blended as much as you want it. Then use this blended roving to create your palm spun yarn as shown above.