My Sheep and Their Wool

Socks, taking over where Tess left off, continues to be my most friendly sheep.  Ma will always allow me to scratch her back and Zelda when she feels like it,  but it has to be my idea.  Socks actually comes up to me and asks for it.

I’m hoping her lamb Pumpkin will be the same someday, but for now, all the lambs are leery of me.  The only difference between them is that Pumpkin and Liam will run from me and Deb will stand there and stare at me, until I try to touch her, then she too takes off.

This afternoon Jon and I dropped of our Spring batch of wool at Maple View Fiber Mill in Brandon Vermont.   We got it to Debbie late this year, between my trip to Gee’s Bend, Lambing, the Open House and Jon’s surgery, this is the first chance we’ve had to make the trip.   So there will be  no October Bedlam Farm Wool this year I won’t be getting it back until sometime between March and June 2015.

As I loaded the big, black plastic bags of wool in to the car, I realized how different our flock is since the fall shearing and now.    This batch will have Kim’s wool in it for the first time.  Debbie will be making it into bumps, she said it was too long to make into yarn.  I’ll also have bumps from Socks.  Then I’ll have yarn from Suzy, Ma and Zelda.  And for this one time only I’ll  have yarn from Ted.  Ted is he ram we borrowed from the farmer in Vermont, he’s  the father of all our lambs.  He was at the farm when the sheep were shorn, so for one season, Ted’s wool will be Bedlam Farm Wool.

When we shear the sheep again in October, things will be different again.  I’ll be interested to see how much wool we get from the lambs.  I’m tempted to say that after that things will become more predictable with the flock and we’ll have our eight fleeces from our eight sheep.  But around here, you just never know what will happen.