Delay in transmission

My apologies for the delay in transmission, dear blog readers. I've been setting up a new blog which will be hosted on the Wildcraft site, it's going to be lovely and shiny. It shouldn't be long now before it's ready. Watch here for news and a link when it's up and ready to read!

I've been doing plenty of spinning, knitting and dyeing too, so there'll be plenty to write about. Oh and the first lot of coloured Ryeland lambs are due within a fortnight. I'm so excited, watch for lots of cute lamby pics soon!

New Arrivals

Exciting news, my flock of pedigree Coloured Ryeland sheep has grown! Yesterday I collected three lovely ewes from a farm in Wales. I don't have good photos of them yet as they've spent today inside recovering from their long trip. However, here's a sneak preview, aren't they cute?

They don't have names yet, I'm hoping that as I get to know their characters, their names will pop into my head. They're already growing used to me popping in and saying hi at frequent intervals during the day, and it didn't take them more than a couple of minutes to work out the the orange bucket means feed! The little one in the centre photo is the friendliest so far, but the other two are rapidly gaining confidence too. As I've discovered with Giles the ram, Ryelands have very sweet natures, and these ewes seem no exception.

They've been sharing a field with a coloured Ryeland ram on their previous farm, so they may be expecting lambs in the spring. I'll get the vet to check that out however, and if they're not expecting I'll put them with Giles for a while (who seems to have got his act together with the crayon action on the crossbred ewes).

And the best part?! Their fleeces are lovely, a real downland sort, so it's springy and really crimpy wool. But it's not your ordinary downland off-white colour, no these girls have fleece that varies from a pale caramel at the tips, to a lovely silver further down the staple, with patches of brown speckles mixed in. I can't wait to try spinning it!

Ingenue

I've really got back into knitting large projects lately. I guess it's the cold weather that's making me feel the need for warm clothing, and lots of it! Latest off my needles is a sweater called 'Ingenue' (Rav Project Link here), knitted in Debbie Bliss Cotton Angora yarn.

The pattern's from Wendy Bernard's book Custom Knits. It's a fantabulous book, all the sweater/cardigan patterns are knitted in the round and most of them are made from the top down. I love knitting sweaters from the top, it means you can try them on as you're going, which makes it easy to see when and where you need to make any alterations.

My Ingenue included the alteration suggested by Wendy for making an off the shoulder neckline. It only involved changing the standard neck edging to a stretchy 2x2 rib, but the final effect is quite different from the standard pattern. The original Ingenue has a firm funnel-neck collar that stands away from the neckline, while mine has a neckline-hugging curvy thing going on, which I love. Since the ribbing is so stretchy, it means I can wear the collar differently according to the look I want. So I could have it all demure and tucked up under my chin like this:

Or slinky and off the shoulders like this:

I love a garment that's this adaptable! Currently on my needles in the same yarn (I bought loads of it in the John Lewis sale a couple of years ago), is the February Lady Sweater by Flintknits. It's actually not a sweater, but a cardigan, and, you guessed it, it's another knit-in-the round top-down garment. I'm consistent in my pattern choices at least! :)

In other news, Giles the Ryeland ram has finally achieved his life's goal. He's gone to meet the ladies! Here he is getting a final check-up, looking very dapper in his new tupping harness (which has a marker crayon under his chest so we can keep a tally of who he's been most friendly with).

And here he is is en route to the ewes' field. Sorry the photo's a bit blurry, he was in quite a hurry to get going and wouldn't stand still to have his photo taken!

Sadly, his first introduction to my three ewes was not all he might have hoped. They took one look at him, ran away and hid in a ditch! Not the best of first dates. However, Giles is very persistent, and they seem to be getting used to him now, they are at least grazing side-by-side. No sign of the marker crayon having had much use, but they're all first-timers, so they're going to need time to figure things out. Hopefully, in a few months's time all Giles' wooing will have paid off, and we'll get some lambs!

Back to normal after shearing

I simply had to post these sheep photos that I snatched this evening. Sadly I only had my teeny-tiny phone camera with me, but I think perhaps it adds to the candid camera effect...

As you'll see, the ewes have completely recovered their confidence in me after their shearing episode. Maybe they've just forgotten it ever happened, or perhaps they've put it down to aberrant behaviour on my part, I'm normally the nice lady with the treats, not the wild woman with electric clippers!

Anyway, here you can see Buffy demanding some more of those nice horse treats:



And this is Willow checking out the camera:



Finally, this strange shot is a birds-eye view of when Buffy the sheep met Krissie the horse for the first time (they're sharing a paddock at the moment). That's Krissie's nose on the left side of the photo. They sniffed each other politely, then both returned to asking me for 'more of those tasty food things please'... I really wish I'd had my proper camera with me, it was a very cute moment.

Shearing Day

I'm broken! I sheared the sheep yesterday, and it was very hard work for a newbie :( Those oh-so-cute looking Texel cross ewe lambs were not-so-cute when it came to removing their wool! The sheep on the BWMB course that I did in January were nowhere near as wriggly as mine...

Anyway, I got the fleeces off, not in once piece, but without destroying them completely. I think I'll have to process them myself (not send them away as I was intending) as there are a fair number of double cuts. But hey, it'll mean I've done the whole lot myself, from shearing onwards...

So here are some of the girls after their haircuts:



Velvet, the old girl (black head and legs) on the right, was by far the easiest to do. She's around 13 years old, so she's had a few shearings from the professionals and clearly knows the score: sit still and it'll be over soon. Do you see the wild-eyed look in Willow and Cordelia's expressions though? It'll be a while before they want to be anywhere near me again!

The Texel x fleeces are very nice, a bit softer than the Suffolk that I'm most familiar with and with a more open staple (I used to have a flock of pedigree Suffolks). It should card and spin very easily. I'm planning to make some drumcarded batts from this wool for the online shop.



Oh and I did also shear Giles the ram, who behaved impeccably, but he needs some more clipping around the legs and face before I take pics. Otherwise he'll be really embarrassed, as he looks very silly. Actually it'll be me who's more embarrassed, I can't believe I left him looking so awful! So no, you can't see photos yet. My excuse is that he was the last sheep I did, at the end of a long day and he's a Very Woolly sheep. How one ram lamb can grow so much fleece is beyond me! It was good that I did him this weekend though, as I already found a small patch of fly strike (maggots, yuk!) in his wool, left without treatment it would have spread very rapidly in this warm weather. Removing the fleece got rid of it very effectively. I'll finish trimming up his little legs later in the week and post pics then. He really is the cutest little thing under all that wool.

Dyed and set

I was planning to do a whole batch of wool dyeing today, which I usually do outdoors as it's messy and (sometimes) smelly. But the weather didn't agree with the plan, we've had wild wind, rain, a bit of sleet, all sorts of stuff. Not to be outdone, I decided that I'd set my horse's stable up as a temporary dye studio. My horse, Sam, doesn't use the stable much, although there is still straw in there from Giles' occupancy a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, armed with a newly-purchased wallpapering table from B&Q (I usually use a picnic bench, but that just wasn't going to fit through the stable door), I set up a dye painting area and soaked some Shetland roving in preparation.

My usual method for painting rovings is pretty time-consuming, as I'm a bit of a stickler for note-taking. Must be all those lab practicals I did at uni. However, since these rovings are destined for sale (in my online shop, which is on its way soon) it's probably a good thing I've got notes, someone's bound to ask me to repeat a colourway. So after setting everything up, I only finished two rovings today, but the table and dyes are still out there, so I can do a whole day's dyeing tomorrow.

Just as a teaser, here are today's two, just before I 'cooked' them.



I base my colours on photos I've taken, the bluey/greeny one was based on a photo of some rock pools at Charmouth beach, while the red/purple one was inspired by a photo of some wild blackberries. The last batch of rovings I did came out remarkably close to the colours in the photos:

This roving, which I called 'Coast'



Was inspired by this photo, taken at Charmouth Beach last spring:



And this one, called 'Calendulas',



used colours from this photo of some calendulas I grew last year:



No idea if today's colours will come out as well as these, I'll post pics of them if they do. And I'll go back to my drawing board if they don't! :)

p.s. Giles and Splodge the rams are getting on much better now, so it looks as though Splodge will be around here for a while. But just to maintain Giles' cute and friendly factor, I'm planning to halter train him, so I can take him out on walks on his own sometimes. Splodge isn't going to like being left on his own at all, but it serves him right for being so mean to Giles in the first place!

Giles and friends

Meet Giles, my new pedigree coloured Ryeland ram, bought to help my ewes produce some lambs with interesting spinners' fleeces. His pedigree name is 'Juggernaut', but I've named him Giles as, like the tv character, he'll be in charge of Buffy, Willow and Cordelia (my ewes). That said, it was recently pointed out to me that the tv Giles' role did not include some of the duties that sheepy Giles will be expected to perform. So I suppose the analogy should end there!

This little guy's not been here long, I collected him from his previous home, way up in the north of England last week. Surprisingly he didn't seem at all bothered by the journey and he's settled in very well here.



The photo was taken yesterday, shortly after I put him and his new companion Splodge, a friend's Texel ram, in their new paddock. Splodge and Giles have spent the last week together in a stable, separated into different pens. The idea was to allow them to get to know each other, although judging by how they reacted when I put them in the field, they still had a lot of 'issues' to resolve. As you can see in the photo below, Splodge isn't the world's prettiest sheep. He's also large, much larger than Giles, and he's keen to demonstrate that as far as other sheep are concerned, he's the boss. Fortunately, Giles is young and very nimble. As soon as Splodge lowers his head to charge at his field companion, Giles bounces out of the way. He also knows that humans are safe. I've never owned a grown sheep that wanted to be near people before, my ewes are very still wary, despite lots of handfeeding, but Giles is just the friendliest little guy. If he thinks that Splodge is looking menacing, he'll come over to me and hide. Whether I could withstand a battering from Splodge is another matter!



They look quite companionable in the photo, but I think they were just pausing for breath. Frankly, I'm not sure that Splodge can stay here for long if he keeps pestering Giles. I borrowed him as my other sheep are all ewes, and putting a single ram in them could be exciting for him, but will play havoc with the lambing schedule. So I'll give Splodge a few more days' trial to see if things settle down, if not, I'm on the lookout for some wether rams to keep him company instead.

Spring with sheep

Spring is definitely in the air around here. This afternoon, while I was in the field feeding the horses, something spooked them and I turned to see all four of the sheep skipping about as though they were lambs. There's something adorable about seeing tiny lambs running around and playing together, but to see a bunch of year-old ewes with full fleeces doing the same thing is just hysterical, it looks so wrong! I really wish I'd had my camera with me. Sadly I didn't, but I'm sure you can conjure up a mental image - it was something like overgrown cotton-wool balls bouncing all over the paddock...

In the meantime, here's a shot I took of two of them at the weekend, during a much more quiet episode in their day:



Other exciting developments today - my copy of the the newly published Pluckyfluff book on spinning novelty yarns (Intertwined by Lexi Boeger) has arrived. I've been looking forward to this so much! And it was worth the wait, compared with her last book (which was brilliant, but tiny), this is huge - and so full of spinner's eye candy it'll keep me entertained for ages. Here's a pic of the cover - the inside is just as beautiful, I'm inspired already.



I'm planning to have a good read of it this evening, and then dive into my fibre stash tomorrow to start experimenting. Maybe I'll use those bouncing sheep as inspiration for a novelty yarn.

Stripey Superwash

I didn't post last week as I was preoccupied with a BWMB course I attended to learn how to shear sheep. For the last two years I've had problems finding a shearer who was prepared to come out to shear my tiny flock. So last year, after spending a whole day shearing four ewes with blade shears by myself, I resolved to learn how to do it properly with electric clippers. Since this is a crafty blog, I won't describe much about the course here - other than to say it was flippin' hard work! But I learned a huge amount about how to handle sheep, and I'm absolutely determined to get some more practice and take the certification test (passing involves shearing three sheep in the 'approved' way in 30 mins, I'm sure I can do that after some practice!).

Anyway, this weekend, exhausted, I thought a bit of gentle spinning would be in order. So, from some of this:


I made this:

Although I say it myself, it's beautiful yarn - I'm really pleased with how it turned out. The roving was a painted superwash merino from Violet Green Yarns, which I bought to make sock yarn - and to try out a superwash fibre, which I've never spun before. I wanted to preserve the colours from the roving as distinctly as possible, so I decided to spin a fine singles and navajo ply it. I haven't done any navajo plying in ages, and I ended up in a right old mess to start with - and the cat who 'helped' me made the tangles even worse! But once I got into a rhythm, the plying went pretty well. I had to run the plied yarn through the wheel (or should that be over the wheel?) a second time, as it didn't have quite enough twist the first time. I was plying on the largest whorl on my Majacraft Rose wheel, so that it went nice and slowly to give my fingers enough time to do the navajo chaining bit, but that also meant it was putting in very little twist with each treadle. The second lot of plying hid the joins in the chains better, although they're still a bit more open than I'd like. Not quite sure how to fix that. But overall, I'm delighted with how it turned out, I think it almost looks like a painted yarn, which is the look I was aiming for. So, that's 30 grams done, now I just have the remaining 100g of roving to finish!

A sheepy interlude

The weather's been so miserable here lately that I haven't caught any decent light to take photos of my crafty projects. But the blog's looking a bit sad, so I think it's time for a sheepy interlude...

These three, who joined my flock last autumn, are Buffy, Willow and Cordelia. The pic was taken on a frosty morning in December, and the sheep were running towards me as they thought they might get some food. No such luck for them, as I was preoccupied with the camera. Can you see the disappointed expression on Buffy's face (she's the one closest to the camera)? She's just realised that I'm not carrying a feed bucket after all.

I'm looking forward to working with the fleeces that these ladies are currently growing. They're last year's lambs, so their wool still has a lamby softness to it. They're Texel crosses, I've never tried Texel fleece before, but from the sneaky glances I've taken of this lot, it seems to be fairly crimpy, but fine, and a nice creamy colour. Probably ideal for socks - which is good, as sock knitting is rapidly becoming an obsession for me. More on that soon...