Random Farm Photos and Decisions

When you see the title, Random Farm Photos, you know that I’ve either been too busy or too distracted to spend time working with my photos and putting together a cohesive story. Busy and distracted go hand-in-hand. Sometimes the hardest thing to get past is the decision making. Where to start?

I finally finished weaving off a 27 yard warp that was on my big loom. The decisions here are all about where to post the finished pieces. These blankets are woven with locally grown Timm Ranch wool yarn in the warp and weft yarn of various sources. The green is my new favorite non-local yarn that I sell here. The others are leftover yarns that I used to carry—U.S. grown yarn dyed by Sincere Sheep. I can sell these on my website or at the Artery in Davis, or on the Artery’s new shopping website. I finally got the photos taken, but haven’t had time to post them anywhere yet. That’s on the list for next week.

These are more of the blankets from that warp. These can be posted on my website or on the N.CA Fibershed Marketplace website. I listed a few of them on that site tonight, but didn’t finish, and I haven’t decided where to post them all.

This blanket was on that same warp. This is one of my newest ideas and you’ll be seeing more about this as I go further. The colors in this blanket indicate the temperatures throughout the year in my area, progressing from wintertime 40’s and 50’s (gray and blue) all the way to over 100 (red) and back to winter. I’m planning to offer this as a kit for weavers and as a blanket that can be customized for a specific year and/or location.

Next up on the loom is this 50 yard warp. It’s on the warp beam but not threaded yet and there is a deadline. So what am I doing sitting at the computer right now?

More distractions and more decisions. I sorted lambs last week and tried to start making decisions about which I really wanted to keep. That’s hard when you like them all. These are some that may be on my list.

This ewe lamb doesn’t have a great spotting pattern, but she is one of the very few lilac lambs born this year and I want to keep a lilac. (Lilac refers to the color on her face that is not black—her fleece will also be a gray/brown color other than the black and white sheep.)

One of the things that I really needed to do was to finish skirting and sorting fleeces. Lots of decisions there. Which fleeces to put on the website? How much VM (vegetable matter) is too much to go in the barrels for processing at the mill? Do I save back a couple of fleeces for potential Sheep to Shawl contests later in the year?

I’m glad to say that I finally finished with the 2021 fleeces and they are ready for the mill. I had already sold most of the wool I had on the website, but now I have added a few more 1-pound lots of the best parts of the fleeces—those with minimal VM.

I had to make a decision about what to do with this ewe named Alice. It’s a long enough story for a blog post all by itself. I’ll just say that over a week ago I found her by herself and obviously in not very good shape. I am convinced that she had some kind of neurological problem and was blind in one eye. That was in addition to her poor body condition. I brought her to the barn. First decision—vet or necropsy lab or watch until Monday? (It was Sunday and everything would be twice as expensive for maybe not much return.) The rest of the week I kept pondering the pros and cons of all those options. She seemed to be better, but not normal and I wanted help with the decision about the final outcome. So I took her to the VMTH on Friday. There really wasn’t a diagnosis but ideas of what could have been wrong. I came home with medications to be administered twice/day for five days. During this time I had removed the lambs because they are plenty big enough to wean and Alice had no interest in them. After the five days of treatment when I put Alice back with the flock her lambs found her and decided that they were NOT weaned. She welcomed them back and right now you can’t tell that she very had a problem except that she is still skinny—but her behavior seems back to normal.

I’ll end this post with a goat picture. These are two of the triplets and they have decided that this feeder is their personal sleeping platform.