Tour de Fleece!

Yippee! I'm in the Ravelry Tour de Fleece and having a great time! Been feeling a bit tired and achy, but carrying on :) First order of fleecy business: add in the angelina I got from Loop to the Jacob fleece I bought at MDS&W. Now I'm almost done re-carding the batts; I had 7 and now I have 3 more to go. I spun up the white jacob (1.4 oz) and n-plied it into worsted. Unfortunately, I didn't get much out of it, only 80+ yds, but I decided to stop thinking about possible projects and just see what I've got when I am done spinning. Today, I'm done spinning the lt. gray singles and will n-ply and finish them. I'll probably have closer to 2 oz of this color. There are 3 more colors to spin after that, then I can play with my Oxford. One of these nights I think I'm going to tease them so they will feed into the carder nicely.

About the carder: when I first started using my drum carder, it was kind of a nightmare. I had crappy fleece that I partially felted when I washed it, the licker-in was a micron too close to the main drum, so I was getting tons of waste on it. After I got wise to fleece and washing and carding, my spinning life improved dramatically. I can't express enough how important it is to prepare your fibers for carding. Not only do the batts come off easier when the fiber is open, but they are smoother, easier to crank and easier to spin with less waste.

As for the Tour de Fleece, I am on three teams: Team Batty, Team Spin City and Team Verb. I hope to finish yarn for all of the teams, though right now, I'm working on Team Batty. Here's my first skein:

And here is a picture of the next color(lt. gray) on the bobbin:

So there's my progress so far :)