Lambing on the Farm

2009 has been a mixed bag for us.

This year we had some ram lambs left too late in the pen bring us some black and white surprises, a couple of weird medical tragedies that left us shaking our heads and some stellar displays of motherhood that reign triumphant over it all.

This video captures the combination of motherhood with an assist from the shepherd.

Happy Easter from our family to yours.

Nuno Felting

This is my biggest experiment to date with Nuno.

I have an abundance of wool and also a seemingly endless supply of scarves. The two I used today I have owned for almost 30 years and while they are full of precious memories, I wanted to bring them into my future too.

This blog will be more pictures then words because I know the pictures will be what you study.

If I had one small piece of advice, it would be to repeat what you already hear every day - "experiment!" Each scarf I used behaved differently with the batting. The one shown was able to receive the wool fibers easily, while the other one (not shown) with a tighter weave, required some additional fiber on top and on the edge to finally bind the scarf with the wool. However, I loved the way my other scarf crinkled in response to the felting process.

For fiber I decided to go with batting. Yes, the books say to use roving (although I think they mean top and you could certainly use both as long as the wool is fine)but that nice roll of batting was calling out to me, so I hand painted it using the scarf as my muse.
I knew the color would morph dramatically from the original design, but that is half of the fun!. And it gave me a starting point and confidence in my color lay down - plus I love to paint wool. I only mention this because many of you may do your Nuno with roving you have purchased and you may not monkey around with all this dyeing alchemy. But if you do, it's lots of fun. It just takes a little more time. In fact, I allow one day for dyeing and then rest for a day while the wool dries before coming back to the actual felting.

You can see how the colors blended and ran and held their own at the same time. It's one of the things I love about blended color. This batting has not been felted at all, it has just been gently put through a heat-set dye. I wrapped it in a towel, put it in a lingerie bag and spun it in the washer before laying it flat to dry.

After a goods night rest and many repetitions of examining and re-examining my roving stash I was finally ready to commit to felt.
I lay down the bubble wrap (bubbles down! - if you don't you will get tell-tale bubble marks in your felting.) I have to admit that I gently s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d the batting out until it was even and almost one-third larger then my scarf. Then I put the batting down on the bubble wrap, the scarf on top of the batting and finally I arranged some leftover robin's egg blue and turquoise roving on top of the scarf, again using the original scarf pattern as my inspiration. One other thing I learned while doing this is that I could have thinned the roving even more. I had done a great job with the batting, but I feel that if I had to do it over again, I would have thinned the roving even more.

This is the part where you get so excited you can't stand it. It's like looking at a bowl of cookie dough and wondering who invented baking? Why not just enjoy it as is?

Now lay an old sheer curtain on top of your fiber sandwich to hold the fibers in place. Then take some mild soap and cold water and sprinkle it over your sandwich. I wore rubber gloves because my hands get so dry and then just massaged the entire scarf for about 20 - 30 minutes. I kept peeling the curtain off to make sure it didn't bond with the scarf and it worked out fine.
Once you've massaged the fibers in the cool soapy water enough to see they are grabbing the silk, you roll them in bamboo and hard felt as you normally would, just forget about the hot water. I did this for quite a while - well over an hour and were my arms sore the next day! I just kept thinking about the Tibetan video from my earlier post and decided I could just get over it and keep rollin'!

Once the felting was done, I rolled it in a light cloth, put it through the spin cycle and then hung it to dry.

I can't wait to share the pictures!! they will be inserted here soon!

Transformation is a great exercise and it was so much fun to see the color, the scarf, and the wool combine and change and blend into something new.

Wooly Mammoth Wins State Fair Ribbon

I love the State Fair. Always have. As a little kid, I used to hit the pavement early in the morning with my pack of cousins and end the day by crawling through the sawdust of the Penny Arcade well after dark. During those years the Ag buildings were a distant curiosity, the draft horses huge and intimidating and sheep still part of a nursery rhyme in dreamland. The bright lights of the Midway and the Fun House mirrors were the draw back then.


But not this year. Now firmly in my 'middle-age' (sounds as expansive as Middle Earth) and running our sheep farm, the State Fair has taken on a delicious new flavor. Now I wander through the cow, horse and poultry barns with great admiration. And it was in the sheep barn five years ago, that we first met our breeder and mentor Scott Crawford. Scott was showing his Crawford Rambouillets and his back pocket was overflowing with ribbons. We were embarking on this journey then and I am so grateful we jumped on the wagon.


This year, with Scott's sturdy support, we entered 2 of our own rams. The first was a yearling favorite named Mo, who was born during our daughter's wedding last June. Mo was a bottle feeder we all came to love and he took a respectable fourth place ribbon in his category. But the most exciting was our spring ram, Wooly Mammoth, the biggest and most handsome ram we have ever lambed. He began growing his horns almost immediately after birth and just outgrew every other lamb in our flock. So, with a few rush charges at the American Rambouillet Sheep Breeders Association we completed his paperwork and he became the first Mackenzie Fields entry into this year's Minnesota State Fair Competition!


After 3 years of helping Scott show his sheep, our two kids have a healthy understanding of how to set the feet of an animal properly, how to protect sheep from the eager hands of fair-goers and how not to let a sheep escape from the show ring. This year was especially fun because the kids had grandparents and friends in the stands cheering them on as they shepherded their babies in. Very appreciated at 8:30 in the morning, especially since they came bearing sugar-covered mini-donuts!

But seeing little Wooly Mammoth ushered into the second place spot was the highlight of the fair for me. He didn't know what was happening to him, but the rest of us were proud to see the judges recognize what we already knew. He was a special boy and headed for a great future. That and watching my youngest daughter 'living large' in her cowboy boots with ribbons hanging out her back pocket and one special one hanging off her ponytail as she swaggered up to the Milk Booth for a tall cold one.

Lambing is the most unpredictable, challenging and rewarding time of the year. The only things you can rely on are some long, lonely nights interjected with a few explosive panics and an overriding concern for the creatures that you care for.

But once you navigate the obstacle course of “what new problem will we face this year?” you get to settle onto an overturned pail or sit in a pile of straw and just fall in love. Lambs are quintessentially innocent. They define the word. They are meek and mild and curious and just looking for kisses and their mother’s milk. Most of our ewes have twins or triplets so we get to see the little lambies curl up and lay their heads on each others back making a little pretzel of warmth and comfort.

We also have some new mothers and sometimes they just don’t know what has happened to them. One new mother gave birth and just ignored her firstborn. Luckily my husband entered the barn just in time to find him lying in the pen and wiped off the sac to keep him from suffocating. He had to assist her in birthing the second lamb but she wasn’t licking either of them off or letting them nurse. How rude! We put her head in a stanchion and she nearly ran us over carrying this steel pen on her shoulders. Explosive Panic #1. We gave her a little Banamine (which is like strong sheep Advil) for her swollen udder and after a night of sleep she recovered herself. She still prefers her second lamb but she lets the little ram lamb nurse, and to watch the ewe lamb tend to her brother just defines sweetness.

Today we have a ewe who is retaining water. Her udder is way too big and the milk is backing up insider her making her belly look strange. We had the vet out at 10:30 last night because she wouldn’t get up and with her engorged udder we feared Explosive Panic #2, but he said she should be fine and should give birth today. I’ll keep you posted.

Tuesday, March 15th - Shearing Day
Aside from hosting a wedding or some other once-in-a-lifetime event, this really is the biggest, single day of the year on the farm.

I spent weeks cleaning the barn so it would be ready to receive these beautiful fleeces! I scrubbed out horse stalls, power vacuumed the floors, set-up my fancy new skirting table, lay down tarps on the already clean floors, organized wood blocks with fleece numbers to mark the fleeces, gathered the notebook that keeps annual evaluations of each fleece, the genealogy records, etc, drew a How-to-skirt-Fleece poster for my helpers and then waited for the starting bell.

My husband Andrew put many long hard hours into cleaning the feedlot. Taking advantage of good weather days, he removed all the winter bedding, realigned gates and put temporary plywood flooring down for the shearer. We were nothing if not prepared.

Tim Kroll, our shearer is a real expert. I wish I had a picture of his hands. He removes a fleece in a single cut, and the sheep grunt as if they were having a massage at the spa. How he maintains his back after wrestling with these 300 pound ballerinas is more than I can figure out!

Monday, Minnesota was hit with a lot of snow. We were still able to drive but the roof on the barn was covered in white. That was merely beautiful until the snow started to melt with the high-noon sun on Tuesday. Madly, we rearranged gates to keep all the sheep out of the dripping snow, ready for shearing and able to be released into their proper group. We have three separate pens right now- one for the pregnant ewes, one for lambs and one for the ewes who are not pregnant. They all have different nutritional requirements and so must be housed separately. Therefore, managing their exit chute out of the shearing area became the challenge of the day. Having a move-as-you-g0 chute system to avoid snow melting off the roof and onto their coats made it nearly an Olympic sport!

My mother, step-dad and daughter-in-law came up to help as did our friend Kayla. All of us in winter snow suits, moving fleeces, measuring and rating them, skirting them, moving gates and generally responding to whatever the day brought. My mother and daughter-in-law loved the smell of lanolin. Every time we brought a fleece inside we were inhaling like mad.

Kudos go to my step-dad for bringing the coffee pot into the barn and running into town to get sandwiches for lunch. I dare say we would have collapsed into the wool out of exhaustion had he not kept us in coffee and food.

10 hours and 35 fleeces later we had successfully made it through the day. Most of the fleeces have been skirted and the rest will be done in a day or two but we succeeded in this the biggest, single day of the year. Now on to lambing.....