Skirting fleeces

The Sunday before we left for our wonderful vacation I took most of the sheep and goats to be sheared. I had planned on doing it myself but time was getting away from me. The shearer, Danny, did a great job. And he made it looks SO easy.
This is the first fall fleeces I have really skirted. It is amazing how much cleaner and easier they are to skirt! The spring fleeces where full of tiny bits of hay and to pick all that out of each fleece was really discouraging me from this fiber venture. But, wow! These fleeces are soooo clean!
Here are a some of the fleeces that I have skirted the last couple of evenings.

Agatha is a white angora doeling. It already looks like it has been washed! It is so clean.

Shetland ram lamb. Lots of crimp and very soft.

Shetland ram lamb. Don't know why it looks so yellow. Guess I need to play with my camera and flash a little bit. This is a nice soft, clean fleece.

Shetland ram lamb. He is the smallest of the three, but has great crimp to his fiber. It is 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 inchs long. Very clean.

Evra's ram lamb is a black bandgerface Icelandic. (Really should think of a name for him). If you clip on the photo it will enlarge and you can see the coloration of his fiber. Very cool. Very soft and very clean.

Herriot is a black gray Icelandic ram lamb. His fleece is silky soft and very clean.

These fleeces are all currently for sale as raw fleeces. If anyone is interested in any please email me.

Have a wonderful weekend! Hopefully I will get some more fleece skirted this weekend as well.

One week and 400 emails later!

My husband and I took a week long vacation last week. We went to Big Piney horse camp near Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. So for a week we had no cell phone service and no internet. It was wonderful!!
They provided three meals a day and as much horseback riding as you wanted. The trails where absolutely beautiful!! 

We loaded our truck and two horse trailer as full as possible. Luckily we never had to stop very fast or else we may have been injuried!

Unfortunately, I did not get a picture of us in camp. We have a tent that fits in the back of the truck, so once we got there everything in the back of the truck had to come out so we could set up the tent!

Here we are with our friends we meet down there. My husband is on the palomino, I am on the grey, and our friends are on the black and paint horse. This is just one of the river crossings we did. It is pretty shallow here but there was one river crossing where I had to really lift my feet up. The water came up to the middle of my horse's chest! And the water was pretty swift! I could feel my little horse 'drifting' down stream as we walked across.

The trails where just amazing. This was my fourth trip down there but it was still just as beautiful! The trees where starting to turn, with colors of yellow, red and orange. Lots and lots of hills, some pretty steep.
The horses did an amazing job of getting us where we wanted to go. And they where well behaved for most of the ride, I am so pleased with them!!

After a wonderful week it was very hard to come home. Well.....except for being able to sleep in our own bed. Sleeping on a futon mattress in the back of a truck leaves a lot to be desired!

Then, when I opened my email and there was over 400 emails and really wished I was back in the middle of nowhere! I still have emails to go through!

Pictures, pictures, picures

I thought I would get some pictures before everyone gets sheared this Sunday.

Garnet




Hazel, Evra's ewe lamb, Garnet's ewe lamb




Evra's ewe lamb




Hosta




shetland wether and Garnet's ewe lamb







Evra and her ewe lamb

 Evra and her two lambs have the softest fleece! 




shetland ewe




Herriot followed by Agatha and Evra's ram lamb




Herriot

  Herriot is such a gentleman. I was scratching him the other night and found a couple of cockle burs on his chest. He patiently stood there while I picked and pulled them off. His eyes where half closed the whole time, like he could fall asleep any moment.




Alan

Alan is leaving tomorrow for Goddard, Kansas, where I have a feeling he is going to be spoiled rotten! :)




Agatha



Agatha is still my wild child! But does she have some beautiful fleece!

Where did September go?

WOW! I can't believe it is October already. Boy, am I glad. The weather has been absolutely perfect the last couple of weeks.

I have been busy rotating the sheep and goats every 2-3 days onto new pastures. And I think it has payed off. The last 3 times I have checked their eyelids every single animal had bright red eyelids. Here are a couple of the Icelandic sheep enjoying the pastures. It is so hard to get good pictures of everyone! They all want to be right in front of the camera!








And good grass is not the only things that have been grown well on our property. I don't know what kind of mushrooms these are but they are huge!

And over Labor Day weekend we planted ten acres of pasture in Orchard grass, Timothy, Ladino Clover, and Korean Lespedsia. This picture was taken just three weeks after it was planted. Unfortunately, since this picture was taken it has not rained at all and now I am very worried all the new seedlings have died. I am not going to 'recheck' this pasture until spring (well, I am going to try to not 'recheck'). I am hoping that the seedling have just gone dormant until the conditions are ideal to start growing again.

Have a wonderful week and hopefully it won't be over a month before I post again!  :)