Fleece From Start to Finish-Lauren

This is Lauren.

Before ...

...and after shearing last February.

I came across her washed and partially carded fleece yesterday and decided to finish it before this next shearing. The funny thing is that I have looked several times for this sheep as I was taking photos of all the sheep for my annual Flock List for Farm Club. I couldn't ever get a photo of her but I could have sworn that she was on my breeding list. Looking back through my blog posts to see if I had written about keeping her fleece I found this post in which I said that I hadn't planned to but I traded her for a sheep when I was at BSG in Oregon. No wonder I couldn't find her! I also see that I never wrote the story of Fleece from Start to Finish about Honey's fleece. That will be another post.

This is Lauren's fleece spread out on the skirting table.

This is what the underneath side looks like. It looks browner in the first photo because the tips are sunbleached.

Here is what the staples look like.

Here it is after sorting into colors before...

...and after washing.

That was all done in the spring and I had started to card it. Today I finished the carding job (I thought). I had a lot of black wool and a few batts of white and gray.

I spread out the white and gray batts as evenly as I could so that some of each would go with each the black batt.

Then I carded a third time keeping the white somewhat separate from the black.

The pile on the right is 3 of the finished batts stacked up. I kept all the other batts rolled up in the sleeves that come with the Clemes & Clemes batt lifter. That's 11 batts next to a pile of three! It totals about 1 pound 5 ounces.

I felt very productive now that I was ready to spin all that wool. But look at what I found shortly after:

I thought that the proportion of black to white wasn't right. This is the rest of Lauren's fleece that I hadn't picked yet.

There will be another report later, hopefully when I finish spinning this BEFORE the next shearing day on February 5.