Three weeks to go!

Yes, it's confirmed - three weeks from tomorrow we will be watching our sheep get sheared...hopefully helping out a bit...and then bringing them home! In the meantime, what do we have going on? More barn work, of course! But now we're to the less-disgusting/more-fun part...renovations!

My Dear Husband, who can fix, literally, anything, has already repaired one of the gates to the sheep's pasture, so they will be safe and secure. The next chore was to fix the sliding door that separates the hay storage room from their feeding room:

That last picture shows the new track David put in for the sliding door which will keep any tricksy sheep from climbing onto their feeder to grab at the hay on the other side!

The next thing for my dear, patient husband to do is rig up a 2x4 for the sheep's salt and mineral feeders to rest on:

The sheep need to have access to livestock salt and their kelp mineral mix everyday, so these feeders have to be set up and ready to go when the sheep come home. The renovations to the hay feeder can wait until later as they won't be eating winter hay until, well, winter (or late autumn, depending on how the pastures are doing by that point).

One thing that I'm pretty excited about is that the lawn mowers have been moved out of the breezeway so that I can set up their water trough under the spigot:

I started placing the flattest rocks I could find to start forming a platform for their water trough - I'd rather it be up off the dirt for when said dirt becomes muddy. Once the trough is placed, I'll bring in several bales of new straw for their bedding and for the breezeway. And then all will be ready for their homecoming on April 15th! We are hoping to get to repaint the barn before then, but that is something that can be done this summer, if need be - I don't think Mikey, Panda Bear, and Black Velvet will mind if there isn't a fresh coat of paint on the barn!!

In other news, my dear friend, Lee, has had several lambs born at her place this month! The first were Spring and Daylight, born on March 8th - two little ewes born to mama Wanda:

The next two were March and Windy, a ram and a ewe, born to mama Shadow on March 21st:

And today, four lambs were born! Three ewes to Nina Negra, and one ram lamb to Prima Donna (I'll have pictures of them in my next post)! One more ewe, Daisy, is expecting, and then Lee's lambing will be finished for 2015! It's been such a wonderful experience for our family to get to see these newborn lambs and to learn so much from Lee - such a wonderful teacher and friend she is!

Thanks for reading! :)

Before and After...close to finished, but not quite!

Well, folks, it's raining cats and dogs, so the barn isn't being worked on this weekend. But I am so excited by the progress that has been made, so I think it's time for some Before and After Pictures!

Here is the section of the barn that will be used for winter hay storage - when we first went out to begin cleaning, this is what it looked like:

The floor was just straw and particle board, and it was storage for lawn tools and wasp nests! But now? It's all cleaned out (no more wasp nests, thank goodness), and it has a nice, solid floor, just waiting for hay!

Now, right next door to this section is the part of the barn where the sheep will be able to come inside out of the weather if they wish, as well as where their hay, mineral, and salt feeders will be. When we first started working on it, we thought we were just dealing with straw on the floor...but we were dealing with layers and layers of straw, manure, and rotted particle board:

But after numerous tarp-fulls of crap being hauled out, like these:

we are now down to solid dirt!

So...what is left to do?  Well, the feeder has to be modified to help the sheep eat cleanly -
right now it looks like this:

My Dear Husband will be adding mesh to the front of it so that the sheep have to pull hay out of the holes in the mesh. He will also be adding a trough underneath to catch the hay and keep it off the floor. Then he will be rigging a 2x4 next to it for the mineral and salt feeders to hang.

As far as the flooring goes, we're going to level it with rocks and gravel, spread gravel over the entire thing, then add clean straw to the top. After the enormous amount of work it took to clean out this part of the barn, I am actually looking forward to cleaning out their straw once per year, like Lee does for her sheep - it's going to seem like a picnic!

The gaps and holes in the walls will be patched...we'll scrape the old paint from the exterior and repaint it a beautiful red with white trim...I'd also like to paint the interior as well to help seal the wood a bit better. Gravel and paving stones will need to be put down underneath the water spigot, which is right outside their feeding/shelter section, and then their new trough can be set up (I just got it from Amazon yesterday!)!

Now, far be it from me to leap joyfully in the air, demonstrating how EXCITED I am to be getting so much work finished and to only be a little over a month away from bringing home Black Velvet, Mikey, and Panda Bear! So, because I am such a calm, sedate type of person, I will let our dog, Black Beary, leap joyfully for me instead!

Prepping the Fleece!

To give you all a break from barn-cleaning pictures, I thought I would describe how I've been prepping the Icelandic fleece that I bought from Lee. You might recall that one of the fleeces I bought that first day was from a sheep that is owned by a friend of Lee's - and his sheep are fed differently than Lee's are (in terms of the type of feeder used). This became very apparent when Lee showed me the fleece - the amount of VM (vegetable matter) in Lee's fleece vs. that of her friend's was staggering - very little in Lee's, and a ton in her friend's. Ultimately, what I think I'm going to do with this fleece (from a lovely sheep named May) is send it to a wool mill for processing - there is simply too much VM for me to get out on my own, so in this case, it is definitely worth the cost to make sure it is skirted and scoured well by a team of professionals.  However, I thought it would be good practice to tear off a chunk of it, do some skirting, scour it, and then try out my new Viking combs.

Here is a shot of May's fleece in the bag:

You can see a lot of VM - seeds, grasses, etc., and this isn't even looking deep inside the fleece - there is a lot more in there! But check out the beautiful colors - the thel (undercoat) in the grays and blacks, and the tog (outer, longer locks) in white and gray - yes, I am quite enamored of Icelandic fleece!

So for my trial run, I tore off a fairly large chunk and picked as much VM out of it as I could.

Then I filled up my kitchen sink with scalding hot water and Dawn dish soap, and set the fleece on top of the suds - I hardly had to push it into the water because once the fleece starts soaking up the water, it sinks pretty rapidly. I made sure it all got covered in water, then let it soak for about 30 minutes. I didn't want to wait so long that the water cooled off and the lanolin re-congealed back onto the fleece.

When the water had cooled enough to allow me to put my hands into it, I lifted the fleece out of the soapy water and set it onto a dish towel. Then I cleaned out the sink (made sure all of the dirt, VM, and soap were gone) and ran VERY HOT rinse water, and gently added the fleece (you don't want to shock the fleece by putting it into a rinse that is a drastically different temperature - this can cause it to felt). At this point I had to handle it a bit more than I did with the soapy water - in order to get the soap out, I did some gentle squeezing of sections of the fleece to help it fully rinse. But again, I had to be very careful so that I didn't felt the fleece.

After gently squeezing the soap out of the thicker sections of the fleece, I let it sit for about another 30 minutes. I then lifted it out of the water, gently squeezed as much water out of it as I could, and wrapped it up in clean towels - and continued to gently squeeze the excess water from the fleece. I set up my drying rack in our spare bedroom (where our kitties aren't allowed!), and hung the locks and pieces of fleece out to dry!  By the next day, I had some beautiful, clean fluff:

After only one wash in Dawn and one rinse, I had beautiful, clean Icelandic fleece to start combing! I am a BIG believer in the ability of Dawn to clean dishes and to, literally, get grease out of the way - now I know that it is powerful stuff because of its ability to clean the lanolin out of a fleece so effectively! (And no, I do not work for Dawn, am not compensated for giving my opinion about Dawn, and do not know anybody who works for Dawn!)

So now, in order to comb or card, I was supposed to either do hand-picking or run the fleece through a picker, which is a tool that helps to open up the fleece, allowing leftover dirt and VM to fall out, and to make combing easier. Well, I don't own a picker, so I just played with it for a bit, then started combing it, and ended up with these little nests of combed fiber:

I then began spinning it, just to see what it was like, and I love it!  It's very sturdy because of having the tog and the thel combed together - it is possible to separate the long tog from the short thel and comb/spin them separately, but for this first experiment, I wanted to see what it was like keeping them together.

I was also able to take some of the scoured fleece to Lee's and run it through her picker - after that, I took it home to comb it, but here is what I discovered - the picker seemed to separate the two coats (tog and thel) a great deal, so when I tried to comb them together, I ended up with pills of thel that couldn't be combed in with the tog. So I think that if I want to spin the tog and thel together, I need to skip using a picker.

While at Lee's, I asked her about using combs vs. cards - she said after running her Icelandic fleece through the picker, she just feeds it through her electric carder with no problem, and was really surprised to hear that everything I've read online and in books about working with Icelandic fleece says that it has to be combed. I think the difference lies in whether or not you're using a drum carder (I think that is what Lee has - but one that is motorized) or handcards...whether or not you want to separate out the tog from the thel...whether or not you use a picker...in other words, I think that there are a wide variety of ways to work with this amazing fleece, and it's best to try the different preps to see which one appeals to you the most. So yes, I suspect that there will be a drum carder in my future!

Before closing, let me show you some more fleece chunks that I scoured and combed - have I mentioned yet how much I adore Icelandic fleece???  These come from two of Lee's sheep - Goodie and Prima Donna. I've already sold these fleece to a very nice lady in Virginia, but I plan to buy more of these two sheepies' fleeces - the colors and texture are AMAZING!!!

Goodie:

Prima Donna:

Next time...more barn pictures! So much has gotten finished in the last couple of weeks, and I can't wait to share it all with you!