Roving vs Top vs Batting: What the Names Actually Mean

Buy wool from three different shops and you will get three products with the same name and completely different behaviour. The words describe processing stages, and the industry uses them loosely.

The processing chain

All wool starts as a fleece: greasy, tangled, full of hay. It then goes through some or all of the following.

1. Scouring. Washing out lanolin and dirt.
2. Carding. Passing the wool between rollers covered in fine wire teeth, which opens the locks and lays the fibres into a light sheet. That sheet is a batt. Fibres run in every direction.
3. Drawing. Pulling the carded sheet into a continuous rope. That rope is roving. Fibres are loosely aligned but still crossed.
4. Combing. Pulling the fibre through steel tines, which aligns everything perfectly and discards fibres that are too short. The result is top, usually sold as a braid or a "sliver".

So the sequence is batt → roving → top, each step tidier and more expensive than the last.

Side by side

Why crossed fibres felt faster

Felting is tangling. A felting needle drags fibres downwards past their neighbours, and a wet felter's palms push them past each other sideways. Either way, fibres that already lie across one another start catching immediately, whereas parallel fibres have to be disturbed out of alignment first.

The practical difference is significant — a carded core compacts roughly a third faster than the same weight of tops. That is why dedicated core wool is always carded, and why the extra money for combed top is wasted on anything hidden inside a sculpture.

What to use where

• Cores and bulk — batting. Tear it, roll it, needle it. See wool batting for felting.
• Small shapes and limbs — roving. It winds neatly and controls better than a sheet.
• Surfaces and colour — top. Thin veils pull off cleanly and lay down without fuzz.
• Wet felted fabric — top, laid in crossing layers. The smoothness is the point.
• Nuno felting — fine merino top only. Short fibres do not migrate through silk.
• Blending colour — top on a blending board, or batts if you have a carder.

How to tell what you actually bought

• Top is shiny, dense, cool to the touch and slightly slippery. Pull a length and it drafts out smoothly.
• Roving is duller and lofty. It drafts unevenly, in slubs.
• Batt is obvious — it is a sheet, and it peels into thinner sheets through its thickness.

One more test: hold a length to the light. Top is even; carded preparations show visible thick and thin patches, and often flecks of second cuts.

The words you will also see

• Sliver — a general term for any rope of prepared fibre. Usually means top.
• Pencil roving — roving drawn very thin. Convenient for fine lines in wool painting.
• Rolag — a small tube of carded fibre rolled off hand carders or a blending board.
• Noil — the short fibre discarded during combing. Good core material.
• Prefelt — a different thing altogether: fibre already partly felted into a sheet. See prefelt wool.

What to buy first

A kilo of undyed carded batting for cores, and 50–100 g braids of coloured top for surfaces. That combination covers nearly everything, costs far less than working entirely in dyed top, and gives better results than either alone. Which breed to buy is a separate question — start with corriedale.