Meditation in Action

My blog has been quiet for some time. I apologize. It’s not that I haven’t thought of things to share, it’s mostly the paralysis of integrity – an old affliction of mine. The concepts are not as formed as I’d like, the camera’s in the other room, or I am not convinced the value of my feelings will transfer to you.

But like most challenges, these resistant voices exist only in my mind and today, they are being set aside. In fact, that has been the lesson of lambing this spring.

This year, I was on my own. I don’t mind the solitary. In fact, it’s often easier to process challenges without the demands and voices of others – especially the others that I care most about.

A key challenge to process through is fatigue. Being up at the barn every 4-6 hours for weeks at a time is tiring. As work expands and sleep times shrink, the aches and weariness crescendo into near exhaustion and bone numbing pain.

It was at this point that I found my meditative mind and where my yoga practice came to life.

Having to assist a ewe who was down (with the baby blocking her rumen) I could feel impatience looming over me. I knew I was about to spend an hour, “seeing with my hands” and making choices that would impact two lives – a mama and her newborn. There I was filling with dread, tired and stressed.

Extreme feelings eliminate the mind’s ability to measure time. A minute can feel like twenty. So I brought the clock into the barn as an unbiased judge and began the obstetrics. I will not share the anatomical details but the process was long and could have been disastrous.

Pushing and pulling life from one being to another is best done in union with the ebb and flow of all things – heart beats, breath rates, whatever . There is feedback from her body to my hands – from my hands to her baby – from her baby to my heart. This requires a calm, listening, attentive mind and cannot survive the anxiety of emotions or the intolerance of impatience. I found my balance and held it throughout the procedure and mama and baby lamb are now enjoying the sunshine and the song of the blackbirds and adding their colorful faces to this post.

The Dalai Lama tells a story about a monk, who nearly lost his compassion to the Chinese. I nearly lost my patient, thoughtful self to my fatigue and apprehension. And it would have been deadly.

It is a lesson I am still experiencing: A silly lamb who seems to have missed the DNA that informs her how to nurse took three days of patience. The arthritis in my hands that requires intervals of rest, tempts me toward a temper fit about aging. My smug disgust at myself for the fallen levels of housekeeping during these days – couldn’t Martha Stewart lamb, dye wool and get her laundry put away?

Hmm.
Birthing lambs, I reach into my own consciousness and labor to give life to a quiet mind.

Earth Beneath Their Feet

I love my horses. I love their humor, their elegance, and their honesty.
They tell me directly when they are hungry, afraid, curious or disinterested.
They share their playfulness, their haughtiness and shyness.
They love me openly and disdain me with the same ease.

My horses sleep under the stars every night.
They know the lullaby of the crickets or the north wind with equal clarity.
They hear the coyotes howl at the moon
And the sound of a thousand blackbird wings is as common as their own breath.

They share their pasture with whatever the winds may bring.
In the fall it is the great, fluttering of the Monarch migration.
In the winter it is the sparkling drifts of snowy crystals
And in warm summer it is the alfalfa, the thistles and the millions of insects who dine upon them.

I watched my husband spread our sheep manure over the western field today.
It is a hard job made harder by watching the bones of dead sheep buried within fall away into the earth
So many lost this year – so much of it a heart wrenching mystery.
And now they drop back into the earth to feed the thistles, the hay and the millions of insects who dine upon them.

I am growing old with my horses and I wonder what will become of us.

I have watched my sheep pass gently out of life and hope that I will have the same grace as they.
I love my horses with every bone in my body and can only hope that one day when it is my turn to pass that I can put those loving bones to good use and be reborn into the ground.

I could be the tundra that they set their hooves upon.

I could manifest the earth that carries them through the stars and rolls into the wind to greet the playmates that grace the pasture with each season.

If when I die my soul could be put to work inside the earth that holds my horses and tends my sheep then my love would flare eternal.

I could be happy forever as the earth beneath their feet.

Shepherds Harvest Festival's Got Legs

Four shepherds, four breeds, three countries, six years and one very bohemian festival. That’s what has gone into these legwarmers for my daughter. She ought to be able to dance to the moon and back in these things.

She had been asking and I needed a traveling project so the spark was lit and the project a go. As a spinner, I’ve been purchasing fiber for six years, most of it at the Shepherd’s Harvest Festival. After much hemming and hawing over my stash, I opted for a bit of old Black Blue-Faced Leicester wool top, some new llama from Carothers Country Farm and some Icelandic/alpaca dyed with onion, black walnut and marigolds from Spinner's Web in South Dakota. The color of these natural dyes is hard to describe. It is as if the sunlight is shining back at us through the wool.

These shepherds are also my friends. My daughter saw a cria (baby llama) born at Carothers farm when we were delivering our own wool for processing. The yellow wool, boiled in onion skin and other potions, came from Kelly Knispel in the booth next to mine at Shepherd’s Harvest. A gentle, friendly and creative person, she walks her Dakota countryside to find the plants to make her dyes. I am not truly certain of the source for my Blue-Faced Leicester but I am sure it is connected to Shepherd’s Harvest.

So I spun the Leicester then blended the Carothers llama with the Dakota blend and plied the fibers of my friends and my community. Hard earned, home-grown, hand-dyed, handspun.

Shepherds Harvest Festival is known to blend urban and rural communities and my rural yarn was about to go jet set. We were traveling to Rome, Florence, Nice and Paris and this yarn was along for the ride. 33,000 feet in the air, I passed the measuring tape to my daughter and said “give me numbers!” I drew a diagram on an index card while she whispered inches over her shoulder… under the knee…around the ankle…ankle to mid calf…the people in the seats around us couldn’t hide their curiosity. But I’d made my swatch and my mathematics were in full swing. I wrote the pattern as I knit. A little bit in the hotel room in Rome, more on the train to Florence and the finishing work in the car ride in Nice.

My daughter was thrilled when I finished and even though it’s hot now I know these will come in handy at the festival next spring when the floors at the fair can send up a chill. But I still marvel at the magic: The generous animals who donated their fiber, the sunshine from the vegetable dyes, the labors of so many shepherds, the earnest festival that brings us all together and the technology that sent me spinning around the globe to deliver these humble stockings to tend my darling. The twisting together of so many energies is a big part of the inspiration that keeps me tending my flock, my craft, my family and myself. The life of the festival goes on and on….

Fiber Sandwich

My Yahoo group Spinning-On-The-Edge offered to host a fiber sandwich and I jumped in to play. A fiber sandwich is an event where spinners from a group - in our case all over the world - each toss in about 8 - 16 ounces of fiber.

The host takes each donation and layers them like a sandwich. Then they get sent back out to the participants for spinning. It is a wonderful experience for any spinner and I can't recommend it enough.

There are no wrong answers, many challenges, tons of choices and opportunity and loads of fun.

Here's my journey.

The fiber arrived and I tossed it into a basket, transforming it from a fiber sandwich into a fiber salad!

To begin with, I just grabbed handfuls of fiber and started spinning. It is very dramatic having so many different fibers to work with. Some draft easily and others are quite stiff. You never know what the next few inches will feel like in your fingers.

It was very nervous making at first. I had never experienced anything like it.

Here is what my first bobbin looked like.

I noticed one effect of pulling fiber right from the pile was that I got long strands of color.

My next experiment was to try simple flick carding to create a rolag. As you can see in the following pictures, this created a more verigated single.

Spinning was much easier this way!

Here you can see the verigated effect. I ultimately switched back and forth between direct spinning from the pile and flick carding.

While I was spinning my mind was awhirl with potential color combinations.

By now I was so excited with the unique qualities that I knew I would need more than my original 9 ounces.

So as I spun, I kept laying my original bobbins agains other fiber colors and finally came up with this combination.

It took a few weeks to spin up enough of both the plum and the lavender/turqouise/plum handpainted. This fiber is from my own flock of Rambouillet and I just happened to have it already dyed.

I think it was one of life's happy accidents but you can judge for yourself.

Here is a picture of each of the three singles. The sandwich single is on the left, the turquoise blend on the right and the solid plum in the center.

I think it allowed the multiple colors and textures to both settle and gently set themselves off from one another.

And it does set the imagination on fire!

Here is the finished yarn.

I was so surpised. I could not have preconceived this combination. It evolved through the spinning process.

Next time maybe I'll use green as a background....

The Secret Life of a Shepherdess

I live in a painting - or so I’ve been told.

Large round bales of hay dot my fields, horses graze in the pastures and the setting sun can backlight the path to the woods as well as any Fragonard. As classic or even cliché as those images are, they still carry the power to transport us to more magical places. That’s why painters paint them and why poets still sing their songs.

This is the secret life of a shepherdess. Each day I am transported in the way others are through a painting or a novel. But my experience is not virtual. It is real, rugged and it is magical.

Let’s start with the drama of life and death.

Farmers experience this all the time and I have had several traumas with my sheep. But past the penicillin, the drenches and the wraps are those magical moments where you come to terms with the visceral reality of death and the palatable desire for life. It’s in the moment where the life force in your being reaches for the life force of your animal and tries to find that magical chord of life. You seek it out and if you can, you grab it with your heart-mind and hold on for dear life - their life. These moments are heightened and crisp like a good Michelangelo.

You see the chord of life, you feel it wane, you reach to help, you think, you pray and you connect with this beast. When it’s over, regardless of the outcome, you step back into reality and pay your bills, clean your car or send an email. But you were in the painting. For a moment, you hung from the ceiling of the Sistine chapel.

There are easier, lighter moments and they are just as transforming. These moments come while doing more mundane chores like skirting fleeces in the afternoon sun.

Time alters its speed and slows. Instead of telephones and automobiles you begin to hear the red wing black birds gathering by the marsh. A flock of geese call out to them as they vee south across the fields. The cat and her kittens climbing the hitching posts go stock still every time a flock swoops -the daunting sound of a thousand wings. The dogs, lounging still in the driveway, eye the hawk floating overhead. The sheep, idly chewing hay, beckons the rooster off the fence and onto her back. The llama scolds a lamb for infringing on his lunch.

The most I can do is nothing; otherwise I’ll miss it all, for I am hearing the earth turn. I am hearing Mozart. I am seeing Monet.

These signals, this other universe, this magic is what moves the artist in me and indeed in everyone. How can we not respond to this? All these random acts of the wild telling us the universe is huge and magical and mysterious. So we sing, we pray, we paint, we write, we knit.


My bounty is the wool from our beloved Rambouillets. As an artist and a shepherd I am in constant awe of the spirit that lives in those fibers. The stars that illuminate them at night and the sunrise they greet every day. The peace they hold in their nature.

I am inspired to spend the rest of my day with the wool that has already lived through so much and I ask it to transform so that it may carry its message on. Into a baby bunting the color of a new dawn, a wedding bag dyed in dandelion petals, a pure white ballet shrug, felted mittens for my son.

All the love of the world poured into a few fibers and mailed back out into the spectrum of human reality so that it may bless us, inspire us, keep us and tend to us.

And then consciousness strikes and I must ask myself, “Who is really tending who?” inside the painting, I mean.

And I find one more secret in the life of a shepherdess.

I am in love with Nuno!

I took a nuno-felting workshop this weekend with Swedish felt artist Yvonne Bävman and I may never get my hands out of the soapy water. Her exhibits are mostly needle felted but this weekend was a playful excursion into Nuno.
We made scarves, table runners and handwarmers. We played with silks, cottons and merino in all forms.

Here are some pieces I made inspired by Valentine's Day. A set of handwarmers and a felt heart.




These handwarmers are apparently all the rage in Denmark! They are made of dyed Merino top layered with snippets of silk and lace with more wool on top. They are felted 'in the round' so they have no seam.


This scarf used the ballet Swan Lake as its muse. In this peice I did a more controlled layout using the top to draw swans on the chiffon water. The swans held their shape beautifully across the scarf. When laid flat you see swans floating on blue water.


This next piece was a gift for my mother and she was married in a peach gown so I darkened the color to recognize her 30 years of marriage! It was burgandy, orange and green merino top on silk chiffon. You can see the effect that the wool has - creating bubbles on the silk.

This last piece was made from old scarves that were cut in half and then slit every two inches. Rambouillet roving was woven into the slits and fleece was added on the edges for effect. The roving created an excellent shirred effect. It is very interesting to experiment with top, roving, fleece, silk bits, etc and see the different effects that occur! I hope you all enjoy your nuno play as much as I have!

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.

Mongolian Felt Making

Nomads in Spirit

Sometimes I feel like a Nomad of the Intenet, wandering cyberspace searching for some creative nourishment. I am looking for an idea, information or presentation that connects me to the rest of the world in a soulful way. I am looking for something I have never seen before, but something I recognize never-the-less. I know it when I see it. A bell goes off inside me and says, "Yes. This has meaning. This is rich and rings of truth and came from a heaven I know. And if someone else made it, that means they've been to my heaven - we've both been there, even if we've never met." Even if we're all pretty much nomads wandering the earth.

I find it in theatre, music, dance, art, nature and of course wool. These connections. They are like a warm energy. They are a raison d'etre. They inspire, please, energize and comfort.

I imagine I am making a photomosaic of my response to life and while I am not yet certain what the big picture looks like, I do recognize the small images when they present themselves. So part of my work as an artist is to go through my day wandering in search of a flower or sunshine or shelter or stream of consciousness that I can paste onto the canvas in my spirit and say "Yes. Here's another piece."

This video is one of those images. Some of you may see it merely as a study in anthropology. I see it as a marvel of timelessness, humanity, survival, simplicity, art, engineering, and the life-saving connection to the world around us. I hope you enjoy it and maybe even paste it into your mosaic.

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.

Shepherd's Harvest Festival -
Shepherding has a lot of lonely moments from lambing in the dark nights of late winter to hauling hay and grain in the high heat of July. We find great solace in the country and in the peace of the animals but much of our experience happens in solitary.

Until festival time!

Shepherds, spinners, knitters and other magical folk come out of the woodwork for a celebration of spring and the bounty that this year’s wool harvest brings.

A county fairground in Lake Elmo, MN comes to life with musicians, shepherds, and artists. Booths overflow with all the fixings a fiber artist or just a fiber lover could dream of. There is raw fleece, roving, combed top, handspun yarns, woven rugs, knitted shawls, felted hats and slippers and more then the eye or the mind can inhale. Alpaca, llama, buffalo, goat, rabbit and sheep fill the outbuildings with their charm and unabashed personality. And musicians delight and relieve shoppers and vendors alike. Commercial America melts into the background and the peculiarities and extraordinary talents of this melting pot bubble to the surface and swirl around in a dazzling display.

My son Christopher said it looked like Diagon Alley – the great street in Harry Potter where witches and wizards go to shop. It’s true everyone had some magnificent woolen art to wear. Felted bags, woven shawls, knit sweaters, everything made with love from the hands. One vendor remarked that it was the only time of year when it was acceptable to pet a stranger! Something as simple as wool and plant dye becomes art and wraps you in a wonderful spirit of creativity, peace and nature.

It was also a celebration of family for this world often presents multiple generations both in shepherding and artistry. For our part, we had the Loomis family wheel, circa 1870, to anchor the booth and attract onlookers. My daughter Heather (see picture above) wore a hat and sweater I made from our yarn, and spun our wool on one side of our booth while my daughter Kelsey knit her handspun to the delight of the shoppers on the other. Every grandmother in the world wanted to know if Kelsey’s large wooden needles – a gift from her own grandmother – was the secret to her skill.

We celebrated Mother’s Day in mystic Avolon style as Heather gave me a mobile made of twigs and wool and her handmade charms with glass images of 5 generations of women. After my daughter-in-law, Eszter, retrieved the fleeces from the competition we added our ribbons to the mobile and hung it all on the Great Wheel. Mystical and real all at the same time.

And to top the weekend off, I celebrated finishing up a felted sweater of my own design! I have sworn off knitting for at least 3 weeks so my little muscles can recover.

If you have a festival like this near you, I encourage you to go. You can travel to another world, uncover untold riches and never have to suffer an airplane.

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.....

March 6, 2006
As you other shepherds know, this is the hardest time of the year with the labors of shearing and lambing. We are in the final stages of preparation for both. We have our birthing jugs all set up in the barn which is not too hard, just time-consuming and hauling the fencing around does wear down the back muscles a bit. One of my favorite moments was using an old Porsche car cover to haul straw from one end of the barn to the other to add bedding to the jugs! Zoom, zoom!

Yesterday my husband spent most of the afternoon arguing with fencing that wanted to stay frozen to the ground, herding the ewes together in one side of the feedlot and then going in with the skidsteerer to remove this winter's worth of straw and droppings - most of which were donated by our lovely Llama, HotRod. What a mountain of fertilizer it created! HotRod gave us plenty of stern looks of disapproval at being removed from his winter boudoir, but the shearer will be pleased and the fleeces will stay clean throughout the process.

This morning I did another round of cleaning in the barn getting it as spotless as possible before Tuesday's shearing. I love my Power-Vac! Although I am glad no one saw me. I look like a storm-trooper vacuuming the barn. We have 40 in our flock and I need a large and very clean space to lay down all those fleeces - even with tarps. We have some lovely horse stalls with rubber matting and fairly new pine walls, so this is my annual excuse to clean the stalls to within an inch of their life. Spiders beware, your webs are gone! On shearing day, I lay down tarps, then bring in fleeces as they come off the sheep and they are safe and sound in these immaculate stalls while we get through all the skirting. Even with help we can't skirt as fast as Tim can shear. Just writing about it gets my blood up. I better go check on tarps.

February 24th
I am just rolling up my sleeves to clean up the barn for shearing. We got a new skirting table this year to help us accomodate our growing flock and their lovely fleeces and I can't wait to get it set up. It's still cold in Minnesota and I am only good for a couple of hours at a time of working in the cold before I start to nicely freeze.

February 20th, 2006
Spent the afternoon cleaning and refinishing a fabulous antique spinning wheel, (circa 1800) which we inherited from the Loomis family home in Connecticut. I can't tell the exact maker as most of the label has worn away but the last letters of the name are NROSS. If anyone has any ideas please let me know. We used Murphy's Wood Cleaner to remove 150 years of oily dust and then soothed the wood with a Linseed Oil/Mineral spirit combination. I am missing I believe, the flyer and bobbin unit, but right now I am not concerned with using it as much as recovering it.


February 18th, 2006
My family went skiing for the weekend and left to my own devices I jumped right into the dye pot! I am color testing right now as I develop a color pallette for this year's wool. As always, color combinations will reflect the colors found on the farm. We are on a migratory path for Monarchs so those colors will be certain to fly through the fibers on my yarns, top and roving.

I had splendid success working on the Summer Marsh combination - it came out perfectly the first time.

My blue sky however was a beautiful ocean blue. Nice for a small project but I want to capture the pale blue of my big prairie horizon. I am seeking that almost transparent blue and I got the rich blue of the Carribean!

Playing with the antique color combinations from Karen Kahle's Dusty Little Dye Book, I got some rich tones for the Oak Forest in Fall. I can't wait to knit it up and then start dyeing in bulk for elven knitters !