Monday, February 28, 2011

Lambs!


Jacinda and Raven have lambed! White twin ram lambs and black twin ewe lambs! I'm so happy that they both had twins! Hopefully next year Jacinda will have ewe lambs. She's getting on up there in age and I would really like to have a ewe lamb or two out of her before she retires.

This week has been really rainy, good for the pasture seed that I put out to seed the bare spots, but makes it hard to do any work outside. The garden is doing well. Can you tell I have spring fever!?!

Hopefully this spring, we'll be having the tree stumps pulled and hauled off.

I've been knitting another pair of Fair Isle Flower Socks. I just can't seem to stop knitting socks. This pair I'm using Moonstruck's yarn as the main color and some leftover butter cream white as the pattern color. The color has come out really nice.

I just recieved some books from Amazon that I bought and am flipping through them looking for ideas for projects that I want to do with the yarn that I'm going to have spun with my fleeces. These are really good books and are loaded with designs for color work as well as the history of different ethnic traditions of color work.

Knitting in the Old Way: Designs and Techniques from Ethnic Sweaters

Alice Starmore's Book of Fair Isle Knitting

Traditional Fair Isle Knitting

Traditional Scandinavian Knitting

Shadow taking a cat nap between work sessions.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Neked Sheep and Crazy Weather



Well this has been one crazy week when it comes to the weather! We had about 6 inches of beautiful snow with temperture down to 0 F. There were a lot of tractor trailer accidents for over the road truck drivers. Thank the Lord that my husband was able to make it home safely to wait out the weather.

This week the weather is going to be in the upper 60's F. Today, I was outside in a tee shirt! The garden has started coming up despite the extremely cold weather.

 
Jacinda is due to lamb at the end of the month. So today she got her spring haircut. Tomorrow, I'll be giving Raven her haircut as she's the next ewe due to lamb.

This fall, I'll be coating the sheep to help keep their fleeces cleaner. I'm also experimenting with a new way of feeding the round bale of hay to help keep them from getting so much hay on their necks. I need to wait a few weeks to see how they do with the new method.