I decided to join the Tour de Fleece group over on Ravelry.  The idea is to spin every day the Tour de France rides, if possible.   It starts today, July 4th and runs through July 26th with a couple days of rest, July 13th and July 20th.  I figured planning to spin just about every day for a month should help me improve my spinning and become more consistent.

I’ve been working on cleaning and dyeing a fleece that was given to me.  I had no idea how much work it was going to be.  I started this morning by dyeing up the rest of the fleece.  I dyed three batches – yellow, orange, and green.  Since it was a hot, sunny day, I laid out the wet locks on the floor of the greenhouse.  It was over 100 in there today, and the locks dried quickly.

In the afternoon, I sat down to play with my new (borrowed) toy.  Kate lent me her drum carder.  I had so much fun!

I made holiday themed batts.

I made a whole rainbow of batts.

I’m not planning to spin these as they are, I do plan to blend them.  But, this was the first pass on the drum carder to turn the locks into batts.  I hand-teased each lock and then ran them through the carder.  I can’t believe how much vegetable matter was still in the locks.  I thought that I’d done a great job of cleaning the fleece.  I managed to get a lot of it out, but there are still bits of it in the batts.

When that was all finished, I actually sat down to spin for a bit.  I started spinning the watermelon batts that I made at Fiber Fun day.  I figured that watermelon was an appropriate theme for this summer holiday.

Happy Fourth!