carding

thumb|upright=1.35|Dyed wool being carded with a 1949 Tatham carding machine at Jamieson Mill, Sandness, [[Shetland, Scotland]] thumb|Cotton carder (known as dhunuri or lep wallah) in [[Howrah, Kolkata, India]] thumb|William Tatham Breaker carder. In textile production, carding is a mechanical process that disentangles, cleans and intermixes fibres to produce a continuous web or sliver suitable for subsequent processing. This is achieved by passing the fibres between differentially moving surfaces covered with "card clothing", a firm flexible material embedded with metal pins. It breaks up locks and unorganised clumps of fibre and then aligns the individual fibres to be parallel with each other. In preparing wool fibre for spinning, carding is the step that comes after teasing.

The word is derived from the Latin meaning thistle or teasel, as dried vegetable teasels were first used to comb the raw wool before technological advances led to the use of machines.