More sheep!

Ever seen the movie Babe? The old ewes are border leicesters, one of my favorite breeds for their appearance, fiber and personalities. A small flock of 30 has come up for sale near us and we are debating purchasing them. We have a co-op who would like us to supply them with lamb, although this would mean growing our flock considerably! But even though we may grow for meat production my first and foremost goal is fiber and our girls will be pampered to the extreme for their fiberliciousness. I am considering ordering some sheep coats to keep the fiber as clean as possible. I have thought many years on this, and have decided to give it a go and see how it works. We'll see next spring how quickly i'm able to skirt the fleeces!

Wool has been sent in!

We have brought all the fleeces in to the mill now and they have begun washing the wool for the rovings. We plan to have a bulky merino, a fingering cormo/BFL/merino, a worsted chocolate alpaca/merino/border leicester, a worsted gray merino/border leicester, a dk fawn alpaca/merino/border leicester, and rovings from these as well!

Shearing Day!

*sadly I hit the wrong button on my camera and deleted the shearing pictures from this year, I am devastated! But this is a nice one from last years shearing.

Shearing day went off without a hitch, thankfully, since David arrived to our place about an hour earlier than we expected, and we had just woken up! It was unfortunately a bitterly cold day with wind and drizzling rain. The fleeces are gorgeous though and seem to be bigger than previous years! Fritz our full blooded Merino wether's fleece weighed in at 15lbs pre-skirting. Skirting is the process of painstakingly picking through the raw fleece to take out the hay chaff, sticks and random bugs that became entangled in the fleece.

Easter Sunday looks like it will be finally a nice day for skirting! I am psyched to get out to the garage and get my hands in some greasy fleeces! So far I have 5 out out of 26 fleeces skirted, and I must say, although on the smaller side the Blue Faced Leicester crosses from last year have beautiful long crimpy fleeces!

On a different note - we are proud to announce the arrival of our second daughter Mae Louise, who was born at home on April 5th. She was a day shy of being 3 weeks overdue, but finally made up her mind to enter the world! So far she is quite the trooper and endured a morning of loud shearing without trouble!

The two ladies yet to go...

Here is Bernice and Llama. We are still waiting on them to lamb. Llama always has just one lamb, but we'll see this year. Bernice had triplets last year, sadly only one survived due to a traumatic labor. We are assuming she will have at least 2 lambs this year and all should go just fine! :)

Willa's Lambs

One of our favorite ewes, Willa, had her debut of lambs over the weekend! Although her first lambing, she had twins! Both black and both girls! Willa was always very friendly as a lamb, and although has lost some of her friendliness towards us, she made it quite clear that she was not afraid of us and didn't like us handling her lambs (we try not to handle them too much, at least in the first day or so, but we do dip their umbilical cords in iodine and make sure they aren't to long as an infection prevention!)

As you can see the other lambs are getting quite fat and lively! They will be so excited once the weather brightens up and they can go outside!

Goodbye to Esau

Our dear Border Leicester ram Esau has made his way to a new home. We have many of his offspring and they have all been our favorites, large, good-natured and this year... mostly black! We will miss him greatly, but he has gone to a wonderful new home and it is time for a new boy! We are now on the look out for another perfect Border Leicester ram!

More new lambs!

We now have 9 healthy lambs born this year - 3 more ewes to go. We finally got a white lamb (and a ewe lamb too!) So far 2011 has been a success!