CA State Fair 2022 - Days 1 and 2

I have plenty of other blog posts in my head that I want to share but I haven’t had time. I’ll skip ahead to the State Fair that just finished. I’ve given up keeping this blog “journal” in order.

The last time we were at State Fair was in 2019 and after that the world changed. The pandemic shut everything down, but my “altered universe” began after a serious accident in October 2019. I don’t know why I’m including that here, except that I think it contributes, along with the significant demands on my time, to how this seemed so complicated this year. My thanks go out to my Farm Club members who pitched in and to my husband who did a lot of the “heavy lifting”.

I didn’t get a “before” photo. Imagine the blue pens extending all the way to the white chair on the left. That is was a double row of 8 pens back to back. The first step in setting up the display was to remove four pens and figure out how to deal with the tall double panels that make up the fronts and have the power cord attached.

These are the four pens remaining on this side for sheep. We also have sheep in the pens on the back side.

The fair has a Marketing Program competition with the goal of encouraging livestock participants to provide educational information for fairgoers. My display has always been competitive, sometimes trading 1st and 2nd place with some of the other producers. I wanted to rate on top again this year. This is the display area near our pens.

Farm Club members help set it up and demonstrate for the public. Some members came for two or three days and some came for one, but they all contribute in very important ways.

New for this year was that my granddaughter, Kirby, was at the fair all four days. She and her mom and brother were here for two weeks prior to the fair, and Kirby stayed behind when they returned to Texas.

Kirby spent a lot of time at the Touching Table talking to visitors.

We had raw wool to touch (Q: “Why is it called greasy"?), horns and horn buttons to examine, and temporary tattoos to give out.

After talking to people at the table Kirby was glad to show them the sheep and answer questions.

This is Kirby with her lamb, Rose.

Friday was Kirby’s 8th birthday. She had a party on the weekend with her cousins and other grandparents, but we needed to mark the actual day before we left.

The main gift from us was a stable (thanks to a FC member) for her horses. She also got a coupon to pick out a new Breyer horse at the feed store on one of the days after the fair.

We spent Friday with more public interaction. This post has includec mostly photos of Kirby, but notice all the Farm Club members in the background. They played a front and center role even though Kirby is the focus of most of these photos.

These were long hot days, but Kirby hung in there very well. I’m impressed.

Winners All Around

A friend who raises Jacob sheep in Pennsylvania emailed me that a ewe that came from here won Champion Jacob ewe at the Garden State Sheep & Fiber Festival in New Jersey. Since all the shows I might have gone to out here were cancelled I’ll live vicariously through others’ fun events, and this news prompted me to write this blog post.

This is Royal Unzicker of Ivy Brook Meadows with Meridian Saffron. At the shows I attend in California and Oregon sheep are shown as lambs and yearlings, but Royal was able to enter Saffron in an Aged Ewe class at this show. (Thanks to Brittany Smith for this photo and the one of the ram.)

Here is a baby picture of Saffron in 2017.

Here she is after her first shearing.

This is what her fleece looked like before shearing. Royal bought Saffron in 2018 with the plan that she and two other yearlings could make it to Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival in May by catching a ride with the sheep of another friend who shows back there every year.

Saffron’s sire is bide a wee Buster of the Bide a Wee farm in Oregon. This is a photo from his first season of breeding here.

Buster is on the left with Clark, one of his sons, on the right. I find it interesting to compare the lamb and adult photos. Buster has sired a lot of sheep, some of whom are still here.

The combination of Sonata (the ewe in this photo) and Buster produced another nice lamb, Soprano, in 2018.

This is Soprano as a yearling at Black Sheep Gathering in 2019.

Royal did very well at the show where he showed the Champion Jacob ewe. He also showed the Champion Jacob ram, the Reserve Champions, and Best Flock. This is Patchwork Cooper. Patchwork Farm is where two of my new lambs came from and I think Cooper is somehow related but now I don’t remember how. I sure love those horns.

I think that I should add here, that it’s not all about the showing. All of us have plenty of nice sheep that have never won awards and we all point out that it is just one person’s opinion on one day so it’s not really that important. But, hey, the shows are fun and why not brag when you have the chance? I hope that we’ll be able to do a little bragging next year, but the first step will be that the shows won’t be cancelled. The biggest news I heard about the California State Fair for 2022 is that they have a new category to enter—Cannabis. Is that enough to make sure the fair goes ahead as planned?

Kirby's Blanket

This is Belle, a 2 year old lilac ewe. Lilac is this color in Jacob sheep that is kind of a gray-brown instead of black. She is pregnant and due to lamb in a about a week. What is special about Belle—at least any more special than any of the other sheep? She is owned by my granddaughter, Kirby.

Way back in 2019 when we all had normal lives, Kirby’s family came from their home in Texas to spend a couple of weeks in the summer. I had selected a lamb to register in Kirby’s name and I got her gentled down before the family got here. This is the story and photos of Kirby coming to the State Fair and showing her lamb.

This is one of my all time favorite photos. Kirby was thrilled to win a pink ribbon! What color is better than pink when you are a 5-year old girl?

I wish I had photos of Belle being shorn and of her fleece. Instead the story will fast forward to fall, 2020. I spun Belle’s fleece, shorn in February 2020, during our weekly Farm Club spinners meeting on Zoom.

I had decided that I would weave a blanket for Kirby to send her for Christmas.

I gave up the idea of spinning all the yarn for the blanket because I just didn’t have time and I knew that the Timm Ranch yarn I use for many of my other blankets would be just fine for warp. I wanted a generously sized blanket so I warped for a double width piece.

I wove random stripes of the handspun brown and the mixed white yarn.

I shipped this blanket on December 14 with plenty of time to arrive before Christmas. However, I made an error in one digit of the zip code. There is a long story to follow, most of which I have forgotten now, and that’s a good thing. I got a message from FedEx that the package could not be delivered. I think it had ended up in a small town in Texas not that far from where it was supposed to go. I corrected the zip code and supposedly all was well. But it wasn’t. I spent countless hours on-line and on the phone trying to track down this blanket and get it sent to the right address. Katie offered to pick it up at a FedEx office, but I was told that wasn’t going to work. The blanket was eventually shipped to Tenessee (FedEx center of some kind) and then to Mississippi to what is called “Overgoods”. It turns out that is a depository for packages they don’t know how to handle or that are lost. The tracking information kept saying that it had been delivered and signed for. I had to insist that it was not delivered to the intended recipient. I eventually worked my way up the management ladder and found that the only way to get the package out of Overgoods was for me to set up an account and request the package.

I did that and eventually got the package back here in California on January 12. This is how it looked. I shipped it back to Texas via good old U.S. Mail.

Kirby has been using the blanket on her bed, but I asked Katie to get some photos so they went outside.

We have all heard about the extreme weather in Texas last week so I think the wool blanket came in handy. Kirby is looking forward to Belle’s lambs and has asked me if she can name them.