Variegated Sheep

This winter we got a bunch of commercially prepared roving from friends on San Juan Island who also have Cotswold sheep. In fact we got our most recent ram from them. Joel said the roving spun up beautifully and today I started weaving a rug from the resulting yarn. It is a lovely soft grey color but as I was watching the fabric grow on the loom I realized that the gorgeous variegations of the Cotswold wool has been homogenized in the commercial carding. You can see a bit of it if you look close but it is very subtle.Joel has always spun up our wool right from the fleece. We don't card it first and I wash it after it is spun into yarn. We've never sent it off to be commercially carded or spun because well, we are the do-it-yourself sort of people who like to avoid paying someone to do something we can do ourselves. But I hadn't realized this aesthetic value of doing it that way. The yarn from the commercial roving is lovely and so are the rugs but I miss those stripes of light and dark wool that come from spinning the yarn directly from the fleece. I'm not sure it would be possible to do this on a commercial scale.
Colored Cotswold sheep have variegated fleeces as you can see in this picture. An individual fleece can vary from dark brown to very light grey. I'm sure it makes the wool useless in a commercial sense as you need a more consistent color particularly if you are going to dye it. But for our uses this is special.

With all this wet and windy and cold weather we have been spending a lot of time inside. Joel has been spinning up our fleeces so I can start weaving wool rugs. He spins the wool straight from the fleece
into skeins and then I wash the skeins. We have a nice lot of really dark fleeces this year. A couple of our sheep have stayed dark after the lamb fleece was sheared. This isn't common as most dark lambs are grey after they first shearing.

Onward with More Rugs

After turning out all those rag rugs and rag potholders it's time to turn to weaving up the yarn Joel has spent the winter spinning from the wool from our sheep. It will be nice to work with the soft neutrals of the wools after all those bright and lovely rag rugs.

Fair Results

I'm back from the Fair, tired, happy, and with a few more ribbons to add to the stash on the wall. This year Joel brought home the Best in Show with his grapes.
I was definitely outclassed in the onion department by 5 gorgeous Walla Wallas who won the Best in Class, but still got a blue on my Ailsa Craigs.
I entered a few flowers and got blues on my asters.
And as we frequently do, we bought an award winning fleece from Mother Hildegarde of Our Lady of the Rock convent on Shaw Island. This is a lovely colored Cotswold fleece and I can't wait for Joel to spin it up for me so I can weave rugs out of it.

Naked Sheep

Joel started shearing our 8 adult sheep today. He got four of them finished and we'll have some really nice wool to make rugs out of. He uses hand shears to do the job and doesn't try to do the whole flock in one sitting.
The lambs are so funny when you shear their moms. They run around and bleat looking totally lost as their once very wooly mother comes out of the barn a mere shadow of her former self. She just bleats in annoyance and would, I know, roll her eyes, if sheep could roll their eyes, at her offspring. "I'm right here, chill." Eventually the lamb discovers that all of mom's essential parts are right where they've always been and the family goes off together.

Rugs

I just finished a new batch of wool rugs. I took them off the loom in a big roll and now I have to tie up the fringes or sew up the hems, wash them, hang them out to dry, label them, and then stash them in big tubs until the selling season starts in April. Once I get them photographed, the rugs will also be available in my Etsy Shop.

I've been making these handwoven wool rugs for almost 20 years. Our first sheep were a couple of bummer lambs from a friend who had two sheep who could only count to two give birth to triplets. Not mine, they each said of the third one. So we brought them home and bottle fed them until they were old enough to live in the pasture. Their names were Agatha and Athena. Joel decided that he wanted to learn to spin so that we could do something productive with the wool. I already knew how to weave having learned in college so as soon as Joel had mastered the spinning wheel we were off with a new farm product.

The rugs are woven on a warp of cotton carpet warp in a twill pattern. The colors of the wool are usually the natural sheep colors of white, grey, and ten and I love working with those colors although I do occasionally do a bit of dyeing when I get tired of neutrals. This most recent batch of rugs are all white with two of them having dark grey stripes at either end.