It's A Girl !!

Last night my Gypsy had her single ewe lamb. She is such a good mom and her lamb looks healthy and full of energy! I have named her Luna.

Luna is 37.5 % Gotland/37.5% Finn/25% Shetland. She has a white krunet and a white spot on her cheek. She also has her daddy Sailor's sugar lips. The Finn ewes are due in early May and there is a possibility they will have coloured lambs. They were bred to two different Finn rams.

Sharon , I will talk about my experiences with Finn wool in my next post :)

Little Fleeces All In A Row

Sailor

Abby

Gypsy

Finn drumcarded with silk

Sailor drumcarded with lavender silk and silver kid mohair

I picked up these little goodies from Pat LeClair.

Last Monday I took some of the wool and alpaca to her and she is making our blended rovings.

On a sad note.......our little Abby lost her tiny black lamb the other day :(

Hubbert Farms First Sheep Shearing

Sailor asking "What's up?".

Sailor is sheared first. He's a big strong ram but he behaved pretty well for his haircut.

The day dawned grey and cold but we needed the extra light coming thru the open barn door, especially when working on Abby's black fleece.

In the pic below you can see Gypsy's developing udder. She will lamb first, only 3 weeks or so to go. The rest of the girls have about a month and a half.

Here I am skirting one of the Finn fleeces. My toes were freezing in my rubber boots! Can you believe that I didn't wear a pair of my warm alpaca/wool socks???

Everyone is safe and sound after shearing. We put them into a heated room and gave them some cookies for a treat. I can't believe how much smaller they look after the heavy fleeces are shorn.

This is my Gypsy's fleece. It was the biggest and quite dense.

I got busy washing some of each of the fleeces right away. I am going to spin each colour into a 2 ply and knit a pair of Komi mittens.

Here you can see Gypsy's dark brown fleece in front and Abby's black fleece in back. Sailor's fleece is the silver grey.

Can't wait to spin Sailor's shiney Gotland fleece:)

Lambs On The Way

Gypsy (on the left) does have a huge long stapled fleece but she is definitely preggers. She has 'bagged up' a little. Her sister Abby is not so big but was bred around the same time so we have taken these two girls to the birthing room to wait out their time.

Here you can see the wide load that Gypsy carries compared to her sister. Abby (below) luvs the cookies I bring but Gypsy has no interest in them at all. Next Saturday is supposed to be shearing for the sheep so I promise to take lots of pics so you can see what's underneath all that fleece!

Sorry for the crappy pics. I have a new digital camera and I admit that I am not very good with it. The barn is dark and I tried using the flash (mistake I think) and also the sheep are always moving!

Next

Well my Alpaca Ontario entries are finished and in the mail! Now I am free to work on whatever I want so I decided to start spinning yarn for my sweater. The pattern will be from my A Fine Fleece book. Maybe the Flying Dales cardigan....I luv that sweater.

I wanted to use a wool blend this time instead of alpaca. It's a strange experience working with wool for me.....wool is just soooo elastic.

In my stash is a lovely shetland fleece I got last year.

It's quite fine and soft and has the long staple length that I like. Using my yearling pale grey mohair, I blended shetland and mohair on my big english combs. ( I am definitely going to invest in a pair of two pitch viking combs with a table clamp). I luv my own combed top!

This will be a long term project of course. The yarn will be a 3 ply, hoping for a worsted weight but it will probably be more of a sport weight. My fingers always want to spin finer so I might have to make a 4 ply. That would be fun to try.