Alvord Children's Farm

9am-12:30am (10.5hrs)

As a culminating project for my culminating project, capstone of my capstone, I have been spending the last three days passing on a small part of what I've learned to a group of children at Alvord Children's farm. I got to teach the little ones to felt, spin, card wool, and weave, as well as telling them more about the fiber farming process and teaching them about foods, animals, and general life on a farm. The other two women helping with the farming camp were also excited to learn how to spin with a drop-spindle.

McTavish day

9am-11:30am (2.5hrs)
 
Sorry, no pictures today.

Being at Tracy's farm, or any of the farms, is always so relaxing; especially when the weather is decent and we can lay in the grassy fields (avoiding the poop piles) and spend some time with the animals. Tracy had a to-do list when I arrived. The first task of the day was to catch the only one-year-old lamb and bring her up to join the little babies now that they are a little bigger and before weening. At Tracy's farm, the new babies and mamas are separated for the first couple weeks so the babies have less big sheep to worry about, and the barn is less crowded. Also, some of the adult sheep could get through the lamb creep (pvc tubes in vertical slats to make the opening wide enough for lambs only so they can get away and get some extra food - baby Rikki lives in the lamb pen). It's better for most of the sheep to only be bred every other year so they can get some weight on before having to share their nutrition with another again - they can get pretty thin with triplets nursing. So Tracy and I went down to the field where the guard llama keeps watch over the non-bred half of the flock while the babies are little. Evidently guard llamas defend their flock with their feet, which is why they don't like their hooves trimmed. (Alpacas in contrast have "fighting teeth" and one alpaca will go after another male alpacas reproductive organs... but not much good against predators.)

The little sheep we were looking for thought it would be fun to come right up to us with all the others but not let our hands touch her. One of the ewes was almost 100lbs, which is quite big for a Shetland, and decided to crawl in my lap to let me better pet her all over. She was exceptionally friendly and I could see Rikki becoming like this - but worse - as she gets bigger. Finally the little girl we wanted let us pet her and we got a harness on, then she was easy to lead back up to the barn where her mother was, having escaped the non-bred pen somehow.

The yearling lamb immediately started going head-to-head with the baby rams who were as big as her. The mama ewes also decided they needed to test their place against this little one. Her mum would get between the yearling and the other adult ewe and defend and protect her daughter for a while, then turn on her to butt herself, then give up and go back to eating for a while, and repeat. Sheep have a strong sense of pecking order. After sheering, the rams often have to duke it out all over again, and the ewes do it too, but with less backing up and charging, and less fatalities or serious injuries.

While the mamas, babies, and yearling were duking it out, we had a barn to clean and they were in it. We let the sheep out to pasture, and I walked behind Rikki, nudging her on, so she would go with the flock instead of curling up in the hay in the barn to watch us clean. Most sheep don't like to be separated from the flock, but little Rikki is perfectly happy with the humans. So we cleaned the barn, then fixed a fence by adding some rubber to the hinge.

Next to the composting wool by the fence we were fixing was a ram skull. Tracy buries the bones and guts in the large dung-pile to keep from attracting predators and compost-clean the skull, then picks out the skull while spreading the manure on the gardens and fields. This one was needing a little more cleaning so she left it out a little longer. From the skull, I could see that the rams had horn bones extending quite a ways off their heads. Tracy told me when you grab the base of the horns on the animal, you can feel where the bone ends by the warmth of the horn - and if you are trimming the horns for some reason, trimming them too short will make them bleed. Inside, Tracy showed me a vest she had just felted and was picking what buttons to use. Tracy uses the ram horns to make buttons, though the bottom part is hollow to fit over the bone, so only the ends of the horns work well. Tracy made some sets of buttons one year and gave them out as Christmas presents.

The last chore for the day was to mix baby feed. I weighed out different amounts of corn, sunflower seeds, oats, and something else, mix it together in a big bin, and add a little feed molasses (what's left over after making human molasses - more bitter of an aftertaste...) to help keep the dust down.

I wish I had pictures for you but oh well.

Shaving a 300lb teaddy bear

9am-2pm (5hrs)

As you may be able to tell from my ridiculous number of photographs and total inability to narrow them down, I think sheering is fascinating. Also, this seems to be the time of year when every weekend is filled with sheering. Again, if you click on the slide show thing, it should show you the rest.

Rolly was up at 5am getting all those beautiful coats off the sheep and in the washer for their annual cleaning, building the smallest pen possible and cramming an amazing number of sheep in there, and doing everything else needed to be ready for sheering. Rolly has had sheep for somewhere around 30 years - she's gone through the entire alphabet with a different letter of names each year and had some accidental A's a year or two ago as well - so she had a pretty smooth and simple set up. All the sheep were corralled in the barn right next to where they would be sheered (with the boys in a pen ten feet away and with at least three fences in between). 

 The sheep came out, got sheered, then went into a pen between where they were and where the ram pen is where all their nice clean coats were freshly laundered and numbered and sorted by size. We dressed them, then opened the gate for them to run back into their pasture. 

Meanwhile the fleece was carefully picked up and carried a couple feet to the door of the barn where the skirting table was and anyone coming by to watch was put to work skirting fleeces.

Rolly and I had made up a stack of cards with each sheep's name and today's date, and Rolly had put them in color/sheering order in a stack on the corner of the skirting table. On some of the cards things were written like "SOLD" or "NOT FOR SALE" and a little "$" in the corner of the nicest fleeces cards so it was clear to anyone looking at the fleeces what was up. The fleeces were rolled up and put in bags with the cards.

 A few people came by during the sheering and bought fleeces, so by the time the sheering was done, the cost of sheering was already pretty much paid for. 

We also took some time to admire the fiber. This is a very fine wool. The fibers were like spiderwebs. Rolly says not to run this through a carder because it will ruin it and it should instead be combed.

Rolly said this is the perfect crimp. 

Rolly's sheep are mostly, but not all Romneys. Here are some pictures I particularly liked of the shearing. You can see the skirting table in the background of this one, and there is someone ready to sweep. Rolly's husband also did a little skirting during the sheering which helped things go smoothly and quickly as well.  

 The highlight for me was definitely getting to sheer the sheep myself. I got to help sheer two ewes and one three-hundred pound ram. I heard Rolly and the man sheering say my name and when I came over I heard that they were saying I should sheer a sheep. I was delighted. The man sheering was a good teacher and it was fun and exiting to sheer. I was so afraid I would cut the sheep, but after seeing how much second cuts I left on the first sheep, I wasn't so worried and did a much better job digging in for the next two.

That purple stuff on the floor is from nicking the sheep and having to put this incredibly purple spray on them to help stop the bleeding.

We finished the ewes and moved on to the rams. Rolly only has three, thank goodness, but they are a much more complected to deal with. Rolly says that she tries to keep the ram she is holding between her and any other rams when she is in the pen with them. To get them out to be sheered, we had a teem of people surround the ram. Once it was on the platform, my job was to crawl underneath and grab its far legs and pull as everyone else pushed the ram over. I little bit scary, but no rams fell on top of me or kicked me in the face which was nice.

This is probably my favorite of Rolly's rams and the one I helped sheer!

Q-tip day at Hum Sweet Hum

 8am-2:30pm (6.5hrs)

The day all the nice fluffy alpacas turn into funny looking four-legged q-tips. I can't possibly include all the shearing pictures, but if you click on the slide-show to the right, you can see more. Sorry, they are not labeled (yet) but they're there.

I arrived on the farm early in the morning where Cindy and the others had been busy at work setting up. The first group of alpacas had been corralled into a small pen, the scale had been set up, shots prepared, and the shearers were setting up camp under one of the shelters with a tarp for a floor. A box of zip-lock bags had been meticulously labeled with each alpacas name for samples to be sent away for micron counting, and large garbage bags had been labeled with each alpacas name for their coats, as well as generic bags ("brown Suri", "white Huacaya") for seconds. Another box of garbage bags had been split down every seem for rolling the fleeces in plastic.

My first order of business was to help put harnesses on all the caught alpacas, then we trimmed their bangs a little and weighed them. We tried various methods of blowing some of the veggie mater off of the animals, but they weren't too keen about that idea and we eventually gave up, though they did get a little brushing to get the worst off.

The idea is to always start with lightest fiber and work our way darker, but in this case, it was more personality based - the lightest colored alpaca happened to be a partly blind baby boy... so he wasn't about to be released into the big field on his own. An alpaca was chosen to go first and lead over to the sheering area where the two men in charge of the sheering lay her down on her side, connected her front and hind legs to ropes, and began sheering with one of them always holding her head.

 
The first cut was a small sample of fiber off her side to be sent away for testing. Then the main sheering began. One of those cut open plastic bags was put down and each side of her fleece was carefully rolled up in the plastic before being put in a labeled plastic bag.

 Cindy was busy making sure each alpaca got their shots and their nails trimmed.

 The seconds (okay but not great parts of the fleece) were put in the generic bags, and the thirds (short dirty bad parts) were put in a big bucket for garbage. Between every animal all of the fiber had to be cleaned up carefully to avoid mixing one fleece with the next, or getting thirds in with the next animals firsts. 

Some of the alpacas had been holding their pee or poop and when they became stressed out during shearing, out it all came! Some good CNA like person then needed to sit there with a rag to keep it from getting on the fleece. We ended up going through a lot of towels this way.

Occasionally there was an alpaca determined to spit, one of which was so bad she needed a sock over her face so the sheerers could work. (They do this to people in the hospital too - never spit on your nurse or you'll get a sock over your head.)

 While we had them all tied up, we checked their teeth, and the ones that needed dental work got their teeth carefully filed down.

To release the alpacas, the sheerer would hold them in a special way while his partner untied. 

 Once the sheering was done, we would either make a human hallway and set the alpaca free to run to the pasture, or we would put the harness back on and lead them there. Most of the alpacas were very comfortable being lead and stayed calmer while they waited to be sheered if I lead them back and forth around the yard, but some of the alpacas were not good with their harnesses at all yet and so rather than nicely being lead to the sheering, we let them out and used the large number of people to corral them towards the sheering tent.

The alpacas seemed very happy to lay in the sun with their new doos, and got some funny looks from the alpacas who hadn't been sheered yet.

Having the alpacas in this very controlled position gave me the opportunity to learn a little more about alpaca anatomy. They have these very funny scent glands on their legs that get filled with something that looks like flaky, crusty, dry butter. Evidently this is normal and important and should not be removed, according to the sheerer who asked the vet.

They also have funny callosus on their chest bones from laying on the ground. (Head is on the right.)