#Vermont sheep and wool festival | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bomberqueen17 · 5 years ago

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fiber festiving

I posted on Instagram about my whirlwind weekend, but. I feel like talking about it in a little more length.

I checked out a tiny farmer’s market near my house, bought some smoked pork skin from the sole meat vendor there (with whom I had previously corresponded on Instagram), and got a nice scone for breakfast. Then Dude and I drove like 45 minutes down to East Aurora to see the little fiber festival that was going on there. I didn’t figure I’d buy anything, and I didn’t, though I checked out the used equipment sale. (There was a nice Ashford Traveler castle wheel for $400, which is about half what it costs new, but that’s kind of a lot of commitment and I’m not sure it came with all the parts. And another vendor had a used Saxony wheel of some kind that looked intact they wanted $300 for but IDK, it’s a big commitment. I think the lady there from the spinner’s guild was right, and I should drop in on a guild meeting and see if anyone will let me try their various wheels, because they’re all quite different and people have wildly different preferences.)

I like the idea of owning a spinning wheel, as I think I’d use it more than a drop spindle. I have spun precisely about uhh a yard of wool on a drop spindle ever in my life, from the raw fleece I found enroute to rhinebeck two or now maybe three years ago-- which i’ve washed some of, and carded slightly less of, and then I’m trying to spin from roving I processed inexpertly, so... it’s not representative, is my point. Anyhow.

I came home and cooked the rest of the vegetables in the fridge and did all of the laundry, and then got up at 5am on Sunday so that I could finish packing and arrive at the farm before noon. I got in on the dot of 11, and picked up Farmsister and Farmkid, and we went up to the Southern Adirondack Fiber Festival, which was at the Washington County fairgrounds-- again, like 35-45 minutes’ drive. IDK, that’s just how far away things are, right?

There, they do the equipment sale only in an auction, which was Saturday so I couldn’t have made it. Apparently I missed out on a bunch of spinning wheel possibilities there, but IDK. I’m not committed yet. But I do think that spinning flax (if I ever get to that point) will be difficult enough that I’ll really want a wheel, so I can have a hand free to kind of manage the distaff and such. I dunno, I really should practice a bunch more with wool first.

So I bought a couple of little bumps of nice well-prepared professionally-done roving, so I can practice. My good heavy spindle with my very first in-progress roving on it is missing somewhere in my living room, so I only have my very lightweight sort of shitty spindle with me, but I did bring it. Hopefully Farmsister can give me a refresher; she has more experience at spinning.

The highlight of that festival, I think, is that we were about to leave and then noticed they were doing a shearing demonstration, so we ran over to watch. It was an older man and a youngish woman (probably he was in his early 60s and she was in her late 30s or early 40s) who work as professional shearers, and he gave a wonderful if extremely talky lecture-- unamplified, so it was sometimes hard to follow him. But it was full of wonderful trivia about the history of wool production and Vermont’s specific role in it (largely due to a fortuitously placed ambassador to Portugal when Napoleon conquered the Spanish throne and suddenly the heretofore-heavily-protected Merino sheep were available to be exported for the first time ever, and the ambassador was a Vermonter and swooped in and took as many as he could grab and established the Vermont Merino, which revolutionized the wool industry and is the foundation stock for the Australian Merinos that currently dominate the world wool industry. to sum it up).

And then he sheared a little bit of a sheep, and then handed it over to his partner, and the woman sheared the whole rest of the sheep with such admirable facility that at one point she paused and did a crow pose (both hands over her head, one foot off the ground) to demonstrate how thoroughly well-held she had this live struggling lamb with just one foot wedged under its shoulder. And surely, she did. Apparently sheep shearers wear these traditional crudely-handmade shoes that have a gathered toe so there’s a big lump there, and you can use that big lump as a wedge to brace the sheep. Sheep have a reflex where if you tip them up onto their butts, they go limp, and they won’t struggle if they don’t think they can get up, so if you flip them onto one shoulder and then have that shoulder braced on your foot so they can’t get it onto the ground, they’ll realize they can’t get the leverage to get up, so they won’t try.

This isn’t to say they’re docile; he told a lengthy story about how he never wears pants with a front pocket because once a big old Icelandic ram with horns hooked his horns through both front pockets and tore his pants right off him. And if you don’t hold a sheep just right, it’ll be up and gone faster than you can blink, or it’ll bite the hell out of you, or kick you or cut you with its hooves, and you’ll all be sorry.

But if you know what you’re doing, you can just flip and flop a sheep all around, and the thing will just give up and let you do it, and sure enough she sheared a second one the same way-- lambs, the first one she did had never been sheared before and couldn’t possibly have known what to do, but barely wriggled at all, because she handled it so competently. They were Dorsets, too, which are pretty hefty sheep-- I’m not a pro but I’d guess the 9-month-old lambs had to be at least 85 pounds if not more.

ah I have pictures:

the sheep’s got red dye on her forelock, that’s not blood-- there was no blood anywhere in this demo, and the shearer said it’s pretty unusual to nick a sheep.

Like, that’s not a little lamb! Look at that thing! Anyway. it was really cute, sometimes she’d be holding it and it’d just have its head sticking out looking around like huh i’m upside-down that’s weird, but it never seemed upset. The others were more upset when it was removed from the pen with them. Meanwhile there was a pen of collies just off to the right of the photo, and every time they got a sheep out all the collies would start barking. “Let us do it! Let us handle that for you!” The old man shearer kept laughing and telling them he had it handled, thanks. But they were So Eager. And at one point one of them got tangled in an (off, mostly-dismantled) electric fence and most of us in the demo audience leapt up out of our seats and then realized the collie’s handler was sitting right there in a car and had already noticed and was going to go help it. (The shearer guy was like ha, I see what you all are really interested in, too bad you missed the sheepdog demo.)

Anyhow. It was great because it rekindled Farmsister’s interest in having sheep, which is a thing her husband wants to do and she’s like “i mean but we have so much else to do” and she’s gradually coming around to it. Not like, a lot of sheep, but a couple-- some of it, we have a farmer friend who raises sheep and has more demand than he can possibly raise, so he might actually just sort of contract with us, and sell them for us, which would be fantastic, so we could add a couple into the meat CSA but not actually, like, have to get into the sheep business. And like, I know that’s meat animals not wool ones, but surely you could just like. Shear one or two, I don’t think I could handle much more wool than that in a year, but that’d be enough to mess around with and figure out if I actually care enough to get into it more.

Phew, that was a longer break than I meant to take. Today I’ve really deep-cleaned the slaughterhouse and got it set up for processing tomorrow, and also have collected a whole bunch of firewood since it’s going to be rainy the rest of the week, and have done some laundry (specifically yurt bedding that got damp sometime last week, probably Thursday), and am now sort of... avoiding doing anything else but need to get off my ass. Sighhhhh make me get off my ass!

I got goulash to make, it’s Time. Go! Go! Argh, I really just want to sit and work-- on the long long drive from Buffalo through the dawn, i talked out to myself the plot of the Solarpunk Cyborgs Novel that has been eluding me, and I finally think I have the backstory squared away, and that means the plot going forward is a lot more coherent. I’d really just like to sit and work on that, but I only have an hour until Farmkid gets home and I think I need to have tomorrow’s lunch squared away by then. So. Up and at ‘em!

#sheep #wool #shearing #fiber arts

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