McTavish and baby Rikki

9am-1pm (4hrs)

I headed over for a morning on McTavish farm, having talked to Tracy about putting ear tags in the new lambs, pruning lama hooves, cleaning the barn, and a couple more sheep to shear. When I arrived, the sheep and guard lama were out in the field, so doing invasive things to them would have to wait for another day. Instead, we got baby Rikki's bottle ready. The feeding nipple screws on to the end of any regular bottle, which I thought was really cool. Filling Tracy's fridge are tubs and tubs of fresh goat milk from a friend who sells the milk that tastes a little funny and people won't drink to Tracy a little cheaper so she can feed the littlest lamb. Goat milk is pretty close to sheep milk, and seems much better than cow or formula. We microwaved the milk a bit to take the chill off and warm the milk, then headed out to the field, turning off the electric fence as we went by. 

 Down in the field, all the sheep continued grazing or sleeping except one. As soon as baby Rikki saw us coming over the hill, she came running towards us. Having a different person holding the bottle didn't seem to matter as Rikki eagerly gulped down the bottle in under a minute. Rikki's food has  been increasing with her weight for the last couple weeks, but now the food has peaked as she is supposed to be learning to eat grass. Rikki was born almost half the size of her sisters and brothers, but has quickly caught up. When she was first being bottle fed, Tracy was letting Rikki eat until she was full, but little Rikki started to get dangerously overfilled, so her feeding was cut back and regulated. Naturally this happens by the Ewes walking off after letting the lambs feed for a minute. The moms won't stand still, so the babies get fed a little bit at a time. For Rikki, feeding has been cut back to every four hours during the day and eight at night (no two-am feeding for this lamb), as well as plateauing in amount. The other babies should also be learning to eat grass now, and the ewes milk production has hit its peak.

(Baby Rikki drinking her Mountain Dew goat milk)

After feeding Rikki, we sat down in the grass to babysit as all the other lambs came running for attention. As the girls climbed over us and cuddled, we had to keep the little boys off and only pet them under their chin with their heads up to try to discourage them from attacking humans when they get older. All the baby lambs have now been sold, except for a few like Rikki who are on the farm to stay.

This little girl below was being very shy when a woman came to look at her, but it seems to have been a momentary problem as she was happy to cuddle today. Spending time with the lambs so that they are well socialized and comfortable with humans from a young age is one of the bigger selling points for these little guys.

After the fun of playing with the babies was over, a neighborhood high school boy came over to do some work, so we eagerly handed over the barn to be cleaned and instead took out a very large mesh table to skirt show fleeces. Evidently the cleanliness of the fleece is one of the biggest things a judge will look for and can make the difference between a blue ribbon and last place. Credit for clean fleeces is either given to the woman who tediously sits for hours with tweezers, going over every inch of the fleece, or to the well trained husband who listens to his wife and is careful to get all the hay in the feeder and none of it on the sheep's heads when he is taking a turn at that chore. (No spinning, skirting woman would ever get hay on the back of a sheep.) The first fleece was very fine and had lots of vegetable matter in it. We removed the worst parts, and spent some time with the tweezers before giving up and rolling up the fleece. The rest of the fleeces to be shown were much better and hardly required any picking and cleaning at all. The large mesh of the table and light breeze helped to get the vegetable matter off. Though Shetland sheep are very small, their fleeces are huge from being so dense and fine. this table is probably four feet by eight feet. Before skirting fleeces, we had taken an already skirted fleece that is not going to be shown, divided it into mesh laundry bags, and put them in water to soak. According to Judith, Goddess-queen of all things spinning, the best way to wash your fleece is to start with a cold soak in a bucked of water that is saved and reused over and over again. The bucket is like a composting sludge, breeding microorganisms that eat things like lanolin and clean the fleece. This is the "like cleans like" theory. I can't say I'd want to clean anything else in that water, but it seemed to be working for Tracy's fleeces.

Before leaving for the day, we took a tour of the spinning wheel workshop to see the progress. The wheels are beautiful and in their final steps to completion. Tracy's husband, Tom, is currently building three wheels. He is taking one up to his mentor every week to learn the next steps, then comes home and practices it over and over again on the next two wheels. The three wheels are each at different stages of completion, and as soon as the first is finished, Tom will begin a third to keep the steps fresh in his mind until he is sure he has learned all the steps and skills.

Back at Hum

10:30am-4:30pm (6hrs)

As I arrived on Cindy's farm, so did the first load of the eight new alpacas coming to board at Hum Sweet Hum for the month. Boarding and breeding seem to be the two main incomes for alpaca farmers. Though the fiber is nice, it takes a lot of work to process and sell. In the background of this picture you can see Cindy's Element. The boarders were taking bringing four alpacas at a time in their sweet trailer, but when Cindy's alpacas hit the road, between two and four will pile in to the back of that little red car. Alpacas prefer not to pee and poop in confined spaces, so usually will hold it - even for longer rides, and generally will stay laying down or "cush" for the ride. The trick is getting the second, third, and fourth alpaca in without the first ones getting out. With this trailer, the animals were haltered and put on leads, then tied to places inside the trailer. 

Some of the young alpacas had never ridden in a trailer and were a little shaky coming out, but once freed, they joyfully bolted all around their new pasture, meeting the neighbors cows and racing their new friends. When the boarders first come, Cindy tends to keep them in a separate pasture from her animals until they settle in. A pair of long term boarders came a couple weeks ago and were booted out of the guest pasture and in to the main one when these guys arrived. 

The previous two had come down from Idaho and were quite shy when they first arrived, but are now getting more comfortable - not so with these eight who were kissing strangers right off the bat. Alpacas have sweet breath from the way they process food and think we smell pretty funny. (They have modified ruminant digestion. they chew their cud, though they are not quite like cows, and when that green stuff comes up, you probably want to hold off the the kisses.)

Back inside, I set to work carting wool into bats. On my first (working) visit to Hum Sweet Hum, skirted and washed fleeces. The next step from alpaca to finished product is the carting. I took the slightly felted wool, and pulled it apart by hand into a big fluffy pile of fiber, still more or less going the same way. Then I took small sections and fed them into the left side of the carting machine where the licker (that smaller toothed roller) picked it up and brought it to the main carting drum (the large one on the right). Once there is a thick layer around the drum, I took a tool, like a long nail with a handle, and separated the fibers along a line across the drum and peeled the sheet of fiber off. Sometimes the fiber needs to go through more than once, depending the animal it came from, how nice it needs to be, etc. I decided once was enough for today. Each sheet gets twisted and wrapped into a nice neat bundle, as seen, thrown in a bin with others of it's kind, then the next one get made. We start with the lightest fleece, do all of that fleece, then move gradually darker. If we felt so inclined, we could also mix fibers at this stage, like silk and merino.

An irrelevant side note on silk: the kind of silk we generally use comes from a domesticated insect - yes, that's right, a domesticated insect - that cannot survive without humans. The moths, if they are to hatch, are blind and flightless, even though they have big white wings. They are pretty cool looking but kind of sad. There are also some kinds of silk worms that have been developed to spin their silk cocoon so strong that it is impossible for them to break through once they become moths and they die trapped in the little coffin they made around themselves. I now have mixed feelings about silk, though it is an amazing fiber...

For my lunch break, I sat down to flip through some fiber magazines while I waited for the quesadillas to  cook. And what a fine looking gentleman they have on the cover of this one. I found this funny.

 After lunch it was time for some physical labor. Cindy and I got to work cleaning out and organizing the shed to be ready for sheering in two weeks. We removed garbage, empty boxes, and bad fiber (I took many garbage bags full of seconds and a couple large bags of stinky thirds got thrown away). Then we sorted to put tools, feed, and things on one half of the shed and the other half for alpaca things, including a shelf for shows and a shelf for sheering and sorting out the old fiber between seconds, firsts, and by color from light to dark. Meanwhile, Cindy's handyman came by and was doing some alpaca shelter roof repairs and building new hay troughs.

The day ended with some afternoon chores - distributing fresh hay and water. All the alpacas were eager to line up to have their toes hosed, and some time with the hose was a nice welcome present to the newest boarders.

 

One of the alpacas had been limping and favoring one leg all day. Cindy ran her hands over the alpaca and found some tenderness but nothing obvious. we kept her in a separate pen all day with her mom and favorite friend and Cindy waited to hear back from some doctor-friends with advice. The alpaca seemed to appreciate having the injured ankle iced with cold water at the end of our sunny day. 

The Cold Reality of Sheep Farming

11:30-3:45 (4:15)

My second trip to Rolly's farm started a little later in the day, when the farm was in full swing, bustling away. Due to the foster puppy inhabiting what is normally Rolly's workshop kitchen, we were banished to dying on the porch, which should be wonderful in April in Eugene, but not today. It was snowing and we were untying tiny knots around skeins of yarn that had been soaking in cold water for the last couple days. I took a picture of the snow on my jacket but it seems my camera didn't think that image needed to be saved (the camera was full of pictures so you only get one for now). In short, it was FREEZING! I think all my fingers and toes went numb.

Anyways, the flow for the day was to squeeze the water out of the skeins we had put in to soak before, and untie and retie the little pieces of string around them to make it loose enough that the dye can properly permeate the yarn. Again working with five skeins at a time, we set up crock pots and electric canning pots all around the house, set the temperature to simmer around 180F I believe, added some vinegar (scientific method: a few glugs), some dye, and then the yarn. While those pots sat to simmer until the water turns clear and the yarn has absorbed all the dye, we headed out to the fields. 

All of the animals: dog, sheep, and alpaca, needed to be let out to pasture which took some juggling. The two female dogs could not share a fence line, some fields are accessed by going through other fields, and the alpacas and sheep needed to be separated. I learned the key difference between alpacas and sheep today on Rolly's farm: sheep run everywhere. Alpacas meander. Rolly opened the gate, and out came an egger stampede of sheep, all thinking, "there might be food! there might be food!" A few minutes later, the alpacas on the far side of the field look up. Rolly shouts back at them not to bother heading this way, and we walk around to let them through a maze of dog-proof fencing to their own field. The rams also have their own pen, and have taken to humping each other - it seems one of the females is in heat and these poor boys can't help themselves. 

Three years ago, Rolly retired from the breeding business. One of her rams wasn't listening very well and had his own plans. Last year or the year before, he got out and got friendly with a bunch of the ewes; including his mother. Now there is a pair of inbred sister and brother wandering about with a few brain cells missing and some unique fleece. 

With all the animals put out to graze and the thunder and lightning and rain/snow/sleet/snane/hail coming down harder than ever, we set to shoveling out the barns - in record time. After all that, it was time to warm up for a while until the sheep were ready to come back in - about an hour. We headed upstairs to the spinning studio and set up some equipment in front of the heater to salvage some very magenta yarn that had been sitting for too long and had gotten eaten by the moths and the puppy and now were tangled messes of broken ends instead of skeins. Theoretically, we would open the skein onto the umbrella swift, and connect the end to the electric skein winder, and we would have a nice, newly wound skein. In reality, we spend the hour picking out ends and untangling the yarn bit by bit to get it on the skein winder. At least it was nice and warm. 

When we felt a satisfactory level of frustration and had enough small victories of making miniature balls of hot pink yarn from the broken pieces, we headed back out to undo the shuffle of the animals (too much grass and they get the runs...). We nicely prepped all the barns with hay and oats to encourage the animals back in, though the icy rain probably helped too, and then began opening gaits. The first in was a little old alpaca who got her own special pen in the corner farthest from the opening and with her own private line of dining options. She happily led herself right in, though she gave me the wide berth a stranger deserves. Next were her grazing companions - a couple other alpacas and a sick ram in need of a shot. After a couple attempts to catch him for the shot which he was carefully evading, we opened the sheep gate. Sure enough, the stampede came thundering back in at a full run with the same "food, food, food" look in their eyes. The rams and single unaltered male alpaca across the way required some shaking of the food bucket for them to be reassured enough to come charging in for supper. By this time, the sick ram had probably let his guard down about us trying to catch him for a shot, and we had a new sneak attack planned, so in we went again and finally caught the ram. Rolly handed me the ram's head with the instructions to "hold him like this" with his chin straight up in the air. It seemed to work, the large snouted creature held still as Rolly undressed one leg and stuck him with a shot in his hind. 

Most of the dyes had exhausted (meaning the water was clear and the yarn colored), so we unplugged them and let them sit to cool off. Our final task was to put some roving in to dye. Roving is the wool after it has been washed and carted (brushed) and pulled in to a long, thick, fuzzy ropes, ready for spinning. Again, we started with the crock pot and some water, added vinegar when it was hot, and then I picked red dye to go in the bottom of the pot. Half the roving went in to the pot, then I picked red, orange, and yellow to go on next. We folded the rest of the roving over that into the water, and put the same colors in the same order on top. We gently patted the fiber into the dye to make sure everything was getting colored, then left it to sit for a while. 

McTavish Touch-ups

8:30am-11:15am (2.75hrs)

I am so exited each day! Today my delight was to visit Tracy on McTavish farm. The task of the day was to sheer a mama who was pregnant with four little lambs and thus was not sheered with the others. A second mama of only one baby was also in need of some touch-ups.

The sheep with the large litter (which is evidently common with Fin breeds), rejected the runt, Rikki, and kept the other three to fight for her two teats. Here is baby number four (Rikki) who has been bottle-fed for these couple weeks of life and even started out in the house with a diaper, though she now lives out in the barn with a pen and heat lamp all to her self to keep away from the other mama's bullying. The other three babies are named Atom, Susi, and Tsunami. Can you guess what day in recent history they were born on?

Tracy is the only farmer I have met so far who sheers her own sheep. She has been farming for about ten years, and started sheering in the last two since her sheerer retired. This provided me with a much better opportunity for a good look at the process. Because she sheers her own sheep, she can do a few a day rather than all at once, which seems to be less stressful on everyone.

A neighbor came along so I was able to get her to take our picture. Usually it is very hard to get good pictures while working and impossible to be in them.

We started with the smaller sheep who only needed a touch-up. Tracy caught her in the barn where all the mama and baby sheep were being kept. We put a halter and lead on her and she became pretty cooperative and calm. Normally Tracy sheers the sheep in the usual manner of laying them on the ground and holding them in various positions with her legs, but that requires a 24hr fast for the sheep which didn't seem safe for the mother of three (plus one), so today we used the stand. The first ewe was lead to the stand where Tracy and I each grabbed under a front leg and got the front half of the lady on to the stand, then repeated for the reluctant back half of her. Fortunately, she is a small sheep so it wan't too bad. Her head was put into a metal guide and a chain was clipped around the back of her neck. One of us stayed on each side of her to keep her from falling off the stand. Tracy started with a line straight down the ewe's back to divide the fleece, then worked her way down. Before unclipping the sheep, Tracy trimmed the nails on each foot and some touch-ups were done with the giant scissor-like sheers.

Because the sheep was being held by her head and neck, we couldn't reach those parts to sheer while on the stand. We untied her and let her step down, then wrestled to safely sheer her neck. All of this fleece was only touch-ups, not long enough for spinning, so it was collected to be put in the compost pile for a couple of years. When we were through, the sheep was very happy to be reunited with her baby and set free. 

Our next guest to the stand was the big mama. This ewe was a mix of a couple different breeds, and two to three times the size of the other sheep on Tracy's farm. She also came to the farm incredibly skiddish and was still not fond of being put in the halter. For this girl, Tracy got out an extra piece of fencing to use as a hand-held wall. We worked until we finally got her cornered between me, Tracy's fence, and two walls. With the mama ewe pinned to the wall, Tracy was able to get the harness and leash on. I held the ewe by the lead as Tracy released all the other sheep back out to the pasture. 

Though this Ewe was significantly larger, she was also highly food motivated, so we took a bucket of pellets and put them on the far end of the stand, then hoisted her legs up on to the platform. From there she was able to scramble up with little help from us, and by moving the bucket of pellets, we were easily able to get her head properly aligned. I held her hips with one hand and gave her periodic handfuls of pellets to keep her subdued while Tracy sheered. Under her thick coat we could see that she was thin with a messy back end and bursting udder from having four and feeding three babies. Tracy was extra careful around the udders while trimming. This time we tried something different to sheer the ewe's head and neck. We untied her from the stand but left her on it with me holding her and kept her distracted with pellets while Tracy clipped away. We rolled up and bagged most of her wool for Tracy to use, though because we were sheering a standing sheep, the fleece was not intact and so won't be sold. 

In the Shetland islands before shearers, and even after shearers came along, the people waited until the spring and then would tie up the sheep and gradually pluck out all the fiber. They felt that this was the best way to get the softest fiber and is loose and comes out easily. 

Before I left, Tracy also showed me her various felting projects as well as the beautiful spinning wheels her husband is learning to make. 

Maggie Casey's Start Spinning: Everything you need to know to make great yarn

2:30-4pm (1.5hrs)


Fiber can be rated by two different scales:

• Micron: the thickness an individual fiber in microns (lower the number, the finer the fiber. Between about 15 and 40.)
• Bradford: the number of skeins that could be made from one pound of fiber (higher the number, the finer the fiber. Between about 30 and 100.) 

5 general categories of fiber and sheep:

• Fine: Merino, Rambouillet, (also alpaca, kid mohair, cotton, cashmere)
  17-23 microns, 62-90s Bradford, 2-4" fibers (short)
  Easy to felt, large amounts of lanolin (oil), tight crimp, elastic, soft, puffy
  Best for babies and next to skin
  
• Medium: Corriedale, Columbia
  23-31 microns, 50s-60s Bradford, 3-6" fibers
  Defined crimp but less compact, stronger, less soft and fine
  Best for sweaters, mittens and hats
  
• Down: Dorset, Suffolk, Southdown (meat sheep from the Downs of England)
  23-40 microns, 54-60s Bradford, 2-4" fibers (short)
  Disorganized crimp, matte surface, elastic, doesn't felt well
  Best for sweaters, socks, mittens
  
• Long/Lustre: Lincoln, Romney, Border Leicester
  29-40 microns, 36-50s Bradford, 5-12" fibers
  Luster like mohair, long, coarse, crimp is a soft open wave, less elastic, very strong
  Best for tapestry, rugs, outerwear
  
• Other: Karakul, Navajo, Churro, Shetland
  Often have two coats - an outer coat that is long and course and an inner coat that is soft and short
  Shetlands, for one, are not a very developed breed, and the fiber is often inconsistent across the fleece (according to Tracy of McTavish Farm). 

Things to look for in a fleece:
Even crimp, does not break, springs back, makes a "ping" noise, no second cuts, clean, fresh (if a fleece sits in a barn for a year without being washed, the lanolin will congeal and be hard to remove), no mats, no dry/brittle tips, no musty smell from being stored wet with moths and mildew

Fun fact: Wool can hold a third of it's weight in water before feeling wet.

A day with Rolly

10:30am-1pm (2.5hrs)

As I drove up the steep and windy road, I saw a field of purple sheep and knew I was at Rolly's (all the sheep have coats on to keep their fiber nice). My first day at Fox Hollow Farm started out with some research and planning. Over a cup of tea, we went through a list Rolly had made of all the things - sheep, alpaca, and fiber related - she does on the farm: the daily chores like cleaning the barn, occasional tasks such as administering antibiotics and trimming toenails, and the never ending work of skirting, washing, carding, and dying fleeces. 

We headed down to the big house for the internet, and spent some time absorbed in research as Rolly presented me with a fountain of names of people to contact to see other types of farms and fibers and information; from who's the friendliest angora farmer to what all those sheep are doing out by the airport.

Fun Fact(/tangent):  the fields of hundreds of sheep you see all around Lane county are not actually sheep farms. As a matter of fact, I don't know if there are actually any large wool farms around here; I believe Rolly told me that most sheep in America are used for meat, not wool. Other people get sheep for silly reasons like to train their Boarder Colly and other reasons other than to have sheep for the sake of having sheep - to have sheep for wool, or meat, or milk, or because they are strange and wonderful animals.... Anyways, those are GRASS farms that bring the sheep out for a couple months at the right time of year to trim down the grass to the optimal level before sending the sheep away again, sometimes over the mountains, and letting the grass grow back again, thicker than ever to harvest seeds or roll up. I knew the Willamette Vally was full of grass farms, but I was so confused when I looked around and saw all the sheep no one was talking about or doing anything with. This makes more sense now.

Well, now that I've taken your breath away with that revelation, I will get on with my day. Back up to Rolly's little workshop we hiked, and there we went through some of the stashes of fiber - wool that needs carting and skeins that need dyeing... and maybe to be scoured a few extra times for good measure and to get any puppy slobber off. To prepare skeins for dying, Rolly takes five at a time - enough for a good sized sweater - and soaks them in cold water over night. We made up three buckets (five skeins each, 15 skeins total) and left them to sit as we went on with watering and cleaning. 

. 

Rolly scrubbed out one of the water bowls as I collected moss that had fallen out of the trees. Rolly and her husband had collected a large wheelbarrow full for a friend who uses it for natural dying. On one side of the driveway is a large field with all the female Romney sheep and alpacas, and two electric and metal fences and a driveway away are the few male alpacas and sheep in a much smaller pen. For the winter, the sheep and alpacas are kept in small pens close to their barns, but in a few weeks when the grass is just a little longer and the weather is staying good, the large grassy fields will be opened up for grazing and the barns will be closed up. In the mean time, the animals still get to come in to the barn and that means daily cleaning. Rolly says they used to use bedding, and just kept adding more layers until it got so thick that Rolly's husband would take three days to clean it out. Now the floors are bare with smooth mats down instead and it takes half an hour to an hour probably to shovel out the barns each day. The manure is taken across to a field that is slowly sinking in to keep the low spots filled up. 

My general impressions so far:

1. Mostly women are interested in fiber farming 

2. Fiber farming is generally a cottage industry, artisan sort of operation, with hand dyed and spun yarn on a small scale

3. Some time is spent each day tending to the animals, with full days spent a few times a year doing bigger projects such as sheering, vaccinating, and breeding. 

4. A lot more time must be spent on the more tedious aspects of processing fiber from fleece to a final product

5. While this could theoretically be a profitable endeavor, fleeces start piling up and it would take serious dedication to keep up with them all 

6. Money often comes from breeding rather than sheering

7. You must love the animals more than the desire for money

8. Most farms are either named off of the street they are on (eg. Fox Hollow, McTavish, Bailey Hill...) or something cute (eg. Ewetopia, Hum Sweet Hum...)

9. Alpacas don't have lanolin (and Shetland sheep don't have much) so the electric shearers need a lot of oil and even still sometimes get too hot to use

First day at Hum Sweet Hum and a spinning circle!

Spinning 12:15-1pm, farm 2pm-7pm, spinning 7pm-930pm

Today... I had an alpaca spit in my face - just once! the second time I ducked.

First stop on the farm was to get acquainted with the alpacas. Cindy took me from pen to pen, introducing me to all her farm-mates. The carrots were a good icebreaker between the alpacas and me. We talked about alpacas, and what we wanted to do for my interning, then got to work sorting through last years fleece before it is time to shear again. We took one bag out of the back room (plus a few more for me to work with later) and brought it outside to a wire mesh table to skirt. Skirting consisted of shaking the fleece a little to get the hay out, then picking through to remove all the really dirty bits, the "seconds" which are a different texture from the other fiber (often from the neck?) and any other little bits of things that didn't belong. Next, we loaded the fleece into mesh washing bags and headed to the sink. A large portion of the day was devoted to soaking the bags one at a time in a sink full of hot soapy water, rinse, repeat, soaking in warm water with baking soda, vinegar, and fabric softener, rinse, repeat, then finally hanging in the bathroom to dry while we moved on to the second and third bag. While soaking we also demoed how to make a felt soap bar, used the internet to research ideas and prices such as at etsy.com, and discussed ideas for patterns, generals about alpaca farming, and a brief interruption to see why all of the alpacas from all of the fields were sprinting down the field filled with looks of curiosity. Once the last of the fleece bags had been hung to dry (only a little felted, but she assures me we can cart it out - good as new), we headed back out to the fields to distribute the water, hay, and pellets. Just as Cindy had told me, the young female alpacas all came running at the sound of the hose and pushed for their turn to have their feet sprayed down. Delivering the hay seemed to warm the alpacas up to me as they learned to see me not as their predator but as their waitress - some of the little ones even felt inclined to nibble away at the bundle of hay out of my arms while others decided to become particularly affectionate and let me cuddle a little, which I greatly appreciated. The final course was the pellets, carefully delivered in the prescribed method. A stack of plastic dog bowls were each given a scoop of food, then the tower was carried into each field of pushy alpacas and a dish was put down for each animal a couple meters apart. Some of the alpacas felt that they needed their dishes to be held up for them, which was okay because evidently this makes them more acclimated to people so we all win. ...sort of. One of the women having her alpacas boarded at Cindy's showed up in time for feeding and made sure to put her two alpacas bowls on opposite sides of the shelter so they wouldn't see each other while eating and steel food.

Once all was well on the farm, we headed out in a caravan, picking people up along the way, to Rolly's house for my first spinning circle. I tried to brush up my spinning skills a little before leaving for the farm, but was still having problems with my wheel unscrewing pieces as the wheel turned. I had little desire to break Rolly's beautiful wheel, so I gave up after my research and tinkering had no effect. Walking in to Rolly's house, one of the other women in my arrival party gave me an estimate on the worth of my borrowed wheel which suddenly made the thing feel heavier and which I tried hard to not think about. Sitting down to wine and cheesecake, Rolly quickly spotted my problem, and once I turned the bobbin the right way around, I understood why this wheel is so nice. While at the spinning circle, I got to feel a bag full of vicuna fiber, and saw some whorls from Peruvian drop spindles.

Sorry, no pictures yet, but I'll get to it soon!