Busy Day

It's late and I'm tired, so here's just a simple run down of what I did today:

• Made my first prototype splint for Peri's leg. I padded her leg with sheep wool (I figured that's a pretty natural padding for a sheep's leg), wrapped it with Vet Wrap, put on a cylindrical splint I cut from a plastic water bottle, and held that on with Vet Wrap. Now I'll keep my eye on her to see if she seems to start using the leg at all, now that the ankle joint is stabilized. If not, I'll have to make a new design.

• Made a new isolation pen to put the sheep in that have been at the fair. Last year, at my request, they had a second barrier around their pen to keep people back (I didn't want some little kid poking a hand in there and getting her fingers mashed by Nicholai's horns). But this year, the fair people didn't provide that barrier. So all week long, my sheep have been petted by hundreds of people who also petted every other animal at the fair. Not exactly a biosecurity dream come true. So I'm putting the returning sheep through quarantine, just to make sure. The two ram lambs are probably bound for the butcher pretty soon anyhow, but I don't want them mixing with the other sheep until then anyhow.

• Set up the back pasture with a hay feeder, water and grain buckets, and moved Shane and Torchsong back there. Being yearlings, they are using energy on growth, so they are a bit thinner than the adult horses they've been pastured with, so by moving them into a separate enclosure, I can feed them extra. Torchsong is so submissive to the other horses, she barely dares to eat with them at all, so she'll do much better with less competition for the feed.

• Went to Richmond with Ken to pick up the sheep from the fair. Loaded them up, came home, and put them in their isolation pen.

• Checked my email and discovered that 3 out of the 4 dolls I put up for sale on Ebay two days ago just sold tonight for my full asking price. That's an extra $400 that I didn't have this morning. Yay!

A Feast for the Senses

A bright, warm autumn day. The sunlight filters through the clouds, the air is clear, the grass dry underfoot. It's picture-perfect weather for the Fall Fiber Festival.

From across the field, a dog whistle chirps and shrills. Obeying his handler, a border collie shoots across the rolling pasture, and a trio of sheep bustle toward the target pen. The air smells of popcorn, doughnuts, and sheep.



Crowds of people, many with shopping bags over their arms, meander along an avenue of tents displaying wares and animals. No one seems to be in a hurry. There are people here of all ages, shapes, and sizes. Some wear cargo shorts and t-shirts, others granny skirts and tunic tops, dusty baseball caps or jaunty hats adorned with felt flowers. A few young Mennonite women in plain blue dresses and white caps pause to examine a yarn display. A woman with long, beautiful silver hair strolls through one of the booths carrying a young black angora rabbit.



Every vague notion I've ever had that a life of shepherding, spinning, and weaving is good for the soul is reinforced as I look around. Every face I see seems open, guileless, and content. Although being in a crowd often feels harsh and nerve-jangling to me, walking among these people is as comfortable as basking in gentle sunlight.

The thing I love about this festival is that it is an absolute feast for the senses. The booths are full of yarns, pelts, socks, sweaters, shawls, and hats of every color imaginable, plus every tool, pattern, book, and raw material you could possibly need to make your own socks, sweaters, shawls, hats and crafts.



While your eyes are feasting on yarns the color of sandstone cliffs at sunset, tropical lagoons at dawn, and peacocks at midnight, your fingers are feasting on the cornucopia of textures. If you are not a shepherd or a fiber artist, you may not know this, but every breed of sheep produces a different type of wool. And here at the fiber festival, you can touch them all.



Here is a bag full of coarse, black Karakul wool, strong for making durable rugs. Here is a pen full of Scottish Blackface sheep whose wool is used to make the famous Scottish tweeds. The Merino and Rambouillet fleeces look odd and lumpy in their raw form, until you touch them and discover how delicate and filmy-soft they are.

Then there are the other types of fiber animals: Tall llamas with their dramatic supermodel eyelashes. Their smaller cousins, the alpacas, whose fleece flows like water through your fingers when you spin it. Curly angora goats, mischievous-looking cashmere goats. Fluffy Angora rabbits with down as light as air.



We strolled through all the booths, touching every thing, oohing and ahhing at how soft this yarn was, how dramatic that color of roving, how skillfully done that piece of craft work.

We stopped to chat with a couple of fellow Icelandic sheep breeders who had a few lambs on display, and also our fellow Buckingham residents, Felicity and John, who raise Shetland sheep not very far from where we live.

All in all, a wonderful afternoon. We came home tired and happy, with our minds full of colors and our fingers smelling faintly of lanolin from all the fleeces we'd touched.

A Day at the Fair

Today we took advantage of our free passes and went to the State Fair.

We go every year, and always have a good time, but this year it just didn't seem as good as other years. The crowds were thin, which would normally make the day MORE pleasant, in my estimation, since I'm not overly fond of crowds or noise.

But the exhibits and vendors seemed very thin this year too. There seemed to be many fewer vendors, and the vendors that were there seemed not to have as many wares on display.

I wondered if this was because the fair was originally planned to move to a different location this year, but then the new venue wasn't ready, so they didn't move after all. Maybe the uncertainty of where it would be put off some vendors?

We always go to the agricultural and plant exhibits, the craft exhibits, and the animal exhibits, but none of them really seemed up to par this year, either.

There didn't seem to be as many animals in the animal display barns---with the exception of the specialty breed exhibits in the Big Red Barn where our sheep were on display. That actually had a nice variety of critters, as usual, including this really strange and cool looking spotted sheep (pictured at right).

It was interesting looking at the sheep on display in the sheep barn, even though they were nearly all the identical-looking meat sheep, slick shorn for showing. They don't have nearly the character of the Icelandic sheep, but they were still pretty cute, with their big ears and mournful faces like the faces of large, docile hound dogs.

I had to admire, though, the superb---even exaggerated---meat conformation on many of them. Broad shoulders, long backs, meaty and rounded all over. These were sheep bred for one purpose only, but bred for it well.

I'd never want to give up variety and versatility of our Icelandic sheep, nor the exceptional leanness and mildness of flavor of the meat. But wow, those huge meat sheep at the fair sure would produce a LOT of lamb chops!

So anyway, we wandered around for a while, but after a couple of hours we got bored and came home. I hope the Fall Fiber Festival this weekend will be more fun!

Ingleside Icelandics at the Virginia State Fair

Most of today was taken up by driving our four chosen sheep (Salem, Savannah, Theo, and Timber) to the vet for their official health papers, and then to Richmond to the state fairgrounds.

Here they are, enjoying a nice snack of hay in their exhibit pen, right after we unloaded them:

They'll be on display in the "Young MacDonald's Farm" livestock breed exhibit in the Big Red Barn throughout the duration of the state fair. So, if you happen to go to the fair, be sure to stop by the Big Red Barn and say hello to our sheep!

Our "payment" for allowing our animals to be in the exhibit is that we get free passes to the fair. So we'll probably make a day of it sometime next week. It's nice, since with our finances the way they are lately, we wouldn't be spending the money to buy fair tickets otherwise. But this way we still get to go.

Meanwhile, I think things are finally settling down here enough that I can get working on those web sites!