Aaron & Tom shear lambs on the third day of shearing. 

Dominique and I were busy; we had been getting the barns and sheep ready for a week  but on Wednesday-Thursday thigh high snow came down.  The ewes were outside in it; Friday night we put all 205 into the barn to dry them off, yet by Monday they were still too wet to shear—what to do—over the weekend, it did not snow as forecast and Monday was a sunny, windy day.

The rams, who had been outside, were drier and we could shear them with a heavy skirt but they were near the lower barns a 1/4 mile away;  with Poem we trailed them up in ruts I'd made in the snow with the tractor (sheep can't move in snow over a foot deep) but after fenceing the ewes outside to wind  dry. 

When I told Aaron that he'd have to start with the rams, he groaned.  Shearers hate shearing rams, especially to begin with,  as they are big (usually outweighing the shearer) and  are almost always uncooperative.  With a late start, Aaron sheared 49 big rams on day 1; 120 ewes, who were now dry, on day 2.  Tom came on day 3 to finish the ewes and shear the 145 lambs.

Luckily, the usual & good roustabouts were there: Chris & Dominique skirted the fleeces; this year Ryan and Jeremy, a stout young lad from the nearby Bruderhof community, manhandled the sheep to the shearers and kept the shearing boards clean.  All in all shearing went well, thanks to everybody. 

We sheared 398 sheep on March 1, 2 & 3.

If you need a good sheep shearer, see Links.

"I don't think anybody remembers the truth or the facts. You remember impressions."

In Adobe Lightroom, I darkroomed this photo as shot.  The exposure was decreased using graduated filters to bring more definition to the rams' faces and to contrast them with the blue  sky, which was adjusted for hue (I love chicory bloom blue), saturation and luminance, to increase the illusion of a third dimension on the two dimensional plane as we see photographs through the perspectival discoveries of Quattrocento painting. 

Yet both versions of the photograph have little to do with what I saw in the viewfinder when I released the shutter. 

Reality, which in many cases is language dependant for meaning, (opposed  to seeing your mother which is not, being pre-language knowlege) is chameleon-like with no fixed repository of meaning.  Specifically, does reality reside in your eyes, in the Nikon D700, in Lightroom, in my eyes, or in medieval eyes who had not yet seen painting by Sandro Botticelli?  All locales have their say here.  Perhaps a  (see)saw from Williams Carlos Williams can help us, “It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it..."  (see for say)

What I saw from behind the camera was none of the above; what I saw was a picture taken by someone else.  One that I'd seen years ago where the ram's head was above the photographer's while standing.  I had longed for the  majestic feeling of that  photograph and now I might finally get something similar to it—circumstances were permitting—I framed the rams with the  Nikkor 24-70mm zoom at 42mm; then shooting Aperture Priority at f/7.1, the camera adjusted itself to 1/250 sec at ISO 2000 and I got 6 exposures (all slightly out of focus, unfortunately) in 2 seconds before the rams changed position in the low, flat light of  the afternoon.  Jean Luc Godard often expressed to Raoul Coutard, his long-time cinematographer, what angle he wanted by referencing another filmmaker's shot, "comme Hitchcock à fait dans Rear Window..."

The rams look over my left shoulder at Poem who is sitting 20 paces behind me.  And you can bet she's looking  back at them waiting for the word.

We have sheepskins for sale now—at the stand and from the General Store—many of you have felt them and bought them.  They are unusually plush and soft  Wool insulates year-round warming you in Winter and cooling you in Summer by keeping a layer of air between you and what you touch.  I like them for seat covers in my truck.

Last weekend we sold two small sheepskins for cats to stretch out and yawn on, and a larger one to bed down a snoring Mastiff.  Gurus recommend meditation on white wool and mothers put sheepskins in cribs to calm babies.  Some people like their first step in the morning to be onto a sheepskin making sure they get up on the right side of the bed. 

Washing instructions from the tannery

• Rinse with cool water.
• Wash with Liquid Ivory in warm water on gentle cycle for 3 minutes.
• Rinse/spin twice with warm water. 
  
• Air dry, then brush or put in dryer to fluff with no heat; or
  
• Machine dry at 120 F.

• Rinse with cool water.
• Wash with Liquid Ivory in warm water on gentle cycle for 3 minutes.
• Rinse/spin twice in warm water. 
  
• Air dry, then brush.
• Machine dry: 120 degrees - or air dry then put in dryer to fluff with no heat.

When I saw this shot in Lightroom, I realized these two rams (walking side by side, heads down) look like they'd been drawn by Bruce Eric Kaplan (BEK) for a cartoon in The New Yorker. 

Then I had to come up with a caption and I'm not very good at that, so...

Caption Contest for Haiti

Get a free skein of worsted (makes a hat) for an entry that captions the photo above, then the list members will vote on the captions and the winner gets 3 skeins of worsted (makes a scarf) then we can sell the hats and scarf at the stand and send all the money to a worthy charity in Haiti in the name of the sheep and the knitters, or...if you have a better idea I'm all ears.  The work has just begun down there and they need help.

§

It's 10 AM.  It just started to snow.  It's  relatively warm, just below freezing; this is a wet, Spring snow with 6 more inches expected; now that the wind has picked up, most of it should blow away on the wind swept plain where the flock is quartered for the winter. 

The sheep now have 11 months of fleece (3 inches) growth; they are warm and they are protected from the wind.  We will shear them March 1, 2 & 3 which is two weeks before lambing begins.

The Yarns

Saxon Merino Worsted
Saxon Merino Sport
Saxon Merino Bulky
Heather Worsted
Undyed Saxon Merino

Local, natural and soft.  Since 1765—first in Saxony, then in Australia and in New England—Saxon Merino sheep have been bred to produce the finest wool in the world.  In the early 1990's Catskill Merino imported five rams from three of the most renowned fine wool studs in Australia to begin once again the tradition of breeding* Saxon Merinos in New York.

In early March we shear the flock.  The  shorn wool is spun into yarn by Green Mountain a small spinnery in Vermont.  We hand-dye the yarn in small lots on the farm.  Our yarn is as natural as our sheep; it has not been synthetically treated to increase its softness or washability. 

Buying yarn here using Google Checkout is easy and secure. 

*Sheep by sheep, we reverse globalization and bring shepherding, and fine Saxon wool back to our shores.  But the sheep, more than I,  are responsible for their coming home if you understand Michael Pollan's thesis about agency (whom does what to who) in The Botany of Desire.

Beside myself, I took a deep breath, signed up and downloaded the analytic chum from web übermench Google that, upon a cursory examination, really amazed me: the number of visitors, what pages they visited, how long they spent there, where they came from (a color weighted map showing from what country even), the sites that referred them, how they moved around on the pages, and on and on for 80 standard reports that I haven't yet begun to plum.

Initially, what surprised me was that after checking out the  Sheep Blog (my home page) and the Yarn Store and the Lamb Store, visitors spent time in the General Store (perhaps because of the page name?) and read about The Saxon Merino (I guess people like sheep history).  They spent much less time on other pages.

Also, GA charts a "bounce rate" where people open a page and leave it almost immediately meaning the page is in need of editing if you want to hold them there longer.  Amazed or surprised or not, this editing is the newness I wanted to avoid, farewell, fare forward, oh well...

Tripwires of memory are everywhere.

Sly and the Family Stone

Now what does G and A mean?

Natural dyes on left and acid dyes on right

Shopping for naturally dyed yarn