#important to note that just because i think roving is a bad prep for beginners doesnt mean you cant learn on it !

[milkweedman]

I bought a drop spindle at an SCA garage sale a while ago, and today found a bunch of blue/green roving at a thrift shop (8 ounces!!) and decided to try spinning it up. I found your intro post and it says batts are better for beginners than roving. Can I turn one into another? Is it worth it to try?

That's awesome !

And yes, you most certainly can turn a roving into a batt (using a blending board) and also a batt into a roving (using a hackle). Blending boards are niche tools though, and for the cost of buying one blending board, you could buy several batts.

You can make blending boards, though.

If you get carding cloth--70 or 90 TPI (teeth per inch) are good all-arounders--and staple it to a wooden board of slightly larger dimensions, then you've got yourself a blending board for usually about 1/4 - 1/2 the price of just buying a new one. (My blending board was about $100 USD, to give you an idea of the general price. They're one of the more affordable fiber processing tools)

You can also just do away with the carding cloth entirely, and make something which is similar to a blending board, with the key differences being that's its both quite a bit worse and free (or very cheap). Either drive a bunch of finishing nails through a wooden board (you want about 1/2 inch or a centimeter of the nail tip exposed on the other side, in an ideal world) as close together as you can, or else tape several pieces of robust cardboard together and drive the nails through that. That's what I did (the cardboard version specifically--actually, found some pictures !) early on in my spinning career when I wanted to blend colors. Disclaimer: I didn't ever actually attempt to pull the fiber off as batts; this was like a 2x4 inch surface and they would have been pitifully small. But I did pull them off as rolags which spun up just fine, and which are also a better beginner fiber prep than roving is.

As to whether or not its worth bothering with any of that... no, not really. To be extremely honest, I'm not positive that 'beginners first rolag made on makeshift nail board' would actually be easier to spin than roving in any capacity (fiber processing and preparation is as much of a skill as spinning is, and like I said the nail board is notably worse at what it is attempting to do than a blending board is, although it does still do it), so.... if you want my firm advice: buy a batt. if you can't buy a batt, give the roving a try as is. if the roving isn't going well, really only then is it worth attempting the stuff I just described.