Author: denisemor

This weekend we made a start on the shearing!

Edgar was (of course) the first candidate.
Here we are mid-haircut-

Kinda messy and disorganized the first time out, but he was very patient with me as I fumbled around with the new electric shears.
And he was rewarded with lots of goodies 🙂

He still needs to have his tummy cleaned up, but all in all, I think he looks pretty good!

I took a little different approach with Chone- started from the butt and worked forward.

Here he is mid-fleece explosion!

Chone’s fleece is so nice this year- and it’s amazing how much of it there was on his tiny little body!

So we’ve got three guys left. The plan is to catch them in the shed next Saturday morning and finish the job.
We’re due for vaccinations, dewormer and hoof trimming too, so it will be a very sheepiful morning.

I got off to a bit of a slow start this week with the colorwork for my Tuin, but now that I’m getting a feel for the duplicate stitch and keeping track of the chart, it’s going more smoothly-

Look! Flowers! I see now that doing it this way is going to take a long time, but I do like having control over the color placement.

In other news, with The Man’s help, I made a minor tweak to my already amazingly cheap and highly useful PVC and conduit Niddy Noddy-

With the addition of a few holes and some old metal knitting needles, it is doubling as a portable lazy Kate!

And I can even store the needles in the center section of conduit.

Neat, eh? (Skye doesn’t see what all the excitement is about) 🙂

Sheeps are starting to ask about getting haircut appointments, but the weather hasn’t been cooperating. Maybe next weekend I’ll be able to get a start on shearing!

So here we are, through the yoke chart (minus patterning)-

and ready to dive in and fancy it up!
I’m thinking of doing the rose motif in red.

I’ve got the first area I’ll be working on counted out and marked-

Kinds fussy,, but I’m hoping the results will be worth it!

For the last three years, I have harvested fleeces from the boys using hand shears-
It’s a pretty casual affair, and we like it that way, but it does take me quite a while to get it done.

This year, we’re changing up the routine.

The new equipment just arrived the other day in it’s own special little suitcase:

Let’s take a look inside!

We’ve got the whole setup, and some extra blades –

Will probably still shear mostly with the boys standing haltered, but hopefully this will help us get through it a bit faster and make it a little easier to clean up their tummies when we do have them flipped.

Now we just need the weather to cooperate.