Author Archives: Robin

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About Robin

Owner of Meridian Jacobs, farm and fiber shop. I raise Jacob sheep, teach fiber arts classes, weave handwovens for sale, and manage the store.

Shearing Day

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I look forward to Shearing Day all year and this was one of the best ever. That is due to the number of friends who helped and to the outstanding shearer. Farm Club members helped in the barn and two good friends staffed in the shop (unfortunately I don’t have photos of them). That left me free to run and back and forth for things we needed, take photos, move sheep, and thoroughly enjoy the day. Shearer John sheared 67 of my sheep, 19 sheep that belonged to other people, and 7-8 Angora goats. He started a little before 9 a.m. and finished at 1:30! Here’s the photo tour.

Sheep in full fleece the day before shearing.

This is Fran.

Here is Tioga…

… and Clint, the ram lamb I got from the Sweetgrass flock in Michigan.

We gathered all the ewes while John was shearing my friend’s goats.

Farm club members, Tina and Kathy, and Kathy’s friend, Haylee, helped bag fleeces…

…and keep the shearing area clean.

Shelby (and her husband, Greg, who escaped my photos) did a lot of sheep wrangling. This is Shelby with her namesake sheep.

Tina did her share of sheep handling too…

…while my son multi-tasked.

John is an excellent shearer, making shearing look easy (and I know it isn’t). He is fast, the sheep look great, and the fleeces are perfect wth no second cuts. We are very happy to have found him. It is always impressive to watch the rams being shorn. This is Savor being shorn.

Savor’s fleece.

Staple from Savor’s fleece. This fleece went home with Jackie, another Farm club member, who helped skirt and sort fleeces and answer questions.

Jackie, and another helper, Linda, helping a customer skirt a fleece…

…and now I have a lot of fleeces to skirt and put on the website for sale.

Rusty enjoyed the day.

Sometimes I think the sheep enjoy getting that wool off.

We certainly had great weather  from the sheep’s point of view.

Thanks to all of my helpers!

Dog entertainment

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Every evening here is what is going on while I’m sitting at my computer:

It sometimes looks and sounds brutal, but Ozzie seems to hold his own.

Ozzie is none the worse for wear.  He is actually using one of the cat baskets I made from Jacob fiber.

Barn Make-over

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It may not be as extreme as the Home Make-over TV shows, but I feel like they just rolled the bus away and I got a new house…almost. This was a Farm Club work day prior to Shearing Day which is next Saturday. I had a list of chores and we checked off a lot. The weather was fabulous too–sunny, warm, dry and it’s November!

I told Tina I had buckets to wash before I put them all away. You could serve dinner out of these buckets now!

I needed to get the salted pelts out of the stall so I could get them ready to ship off as well as empty out the stall so I can use it. Even though the pelts have cured, the salt remaining on them draws the moisture out of the air and they feel wet. A day in the sun took care of that and we put the pelts  in big plastic bags which went in the back of my car until I can find boxes to ship them. We counted 31 pelts in all–that will be some shipping order!

I have an appointment on Monday with the State Vet who checks tags, etc to monitor compliance with the Scrapie Program. Tina, Greg, and Shelby volunteered to check all the sheep and make sure they all have their scrapie tags and that my paperwork is correct. They did a great job and found just a couple of sheep that needed tags. In the meantime we found their namesake lambs.

Here is Shelby and Shelby.

And this is Tina and Tina.

Kathy and Kathy.  Greg will have to wait. I have two more lambs to name and register so maybe he can pick one of those.

I am so tired of tools falling out of corners, being knocked over, not finding them but I have never put up the gadgets to hang them. This was on the list.

Isn’t this cool?

Try to conceal your envy at my organized tools.

I love my stall barn, but it’s hard to use the big sliding doors with sheep. The doors work, but I feel like the sheep are in jail and in warm weather they get no ventilation when the stall door is closed. I have been using my Shaul’s panels with gates, but wiring them up. Greg and Kathy put eye-bolts into the walls to mount the panels properly.

Shelby found time to play with a chicken. Rusty wasn’t sure that the chicken was in the right place.

Thanks to all of you for so much help! Next Fun Day is Shearing!

Artful Fibers

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The show is up at the Artery. Here is a preview.  These photos aren’t as sharp as I like because I need to get a faster lens or bring a tripod.   After I take better photos I’ll post them on my website so you can visit the whole show.

Red Canna in chenille with Julia’s felt hat.

These are 12 felted berets by Julia. You can just see the photo of the Kandinsky painting they represent.

Ruffles in bamboo.

Pleated scarves.

Hooded ruana in Zephyr wool/silk.

Tired of twisting

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We’re setting up the Artery show on Thursday so instead of weaving all day I twisted fringe all day. I don’t particularly like twisting fringe, but I think that most of the things that I weave are best finished with a twisted fringe.

This is a shawl woven with fine bamboo yarn. If I leave the fringe loose it will get hopelessly tangled in use. Also, the bamboo yarn seems to separate into it’s plies fairly readily. So twist it is.

When I weave wool blankets I count on fulling them in the finishing process ( agitation in hot soapy water). The threads become somewhat attached to each other and the whole thing becomes a cohesive unit instead of a bunch of intertwined threads. That is not the process that you want for loose fringe. Twist again.

The green and brown blanket has already been washed. This light blanket (inspired by clouds in a painting of the Sierras while the green one represents the forest) has not been washed.

I wove this ruana fabric a few weeks ago but hadn’t twisted the fringe. Even though I had woven a lot of items I had hours ahead of fringing. Now I think I have just one shawl left and the scarf that I’ll finish tomorrow.

 

What season is this?

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It was a beautiful day today in our part of  California. After a little morning fog the sun was out and it was warm. The ground is wet and there is new grass in the areas where it has been dry all summer. That means fall, but it felt like spring.

There were even a few new flowers.

It really is fall however and there are noxious weeds to show for it. I am vigilant about keeping the worst of these weeds out of my pastures,  but there is one area that is not regularly grazed and I wasn’t paying attention.

Pretty flower, but appropriate for a Halloween post, this is Devil’s Claw.

Here is the green seed pod.

This is what the seed pod looks like as it dries out. Those two pointed tips are very sharp. When they get stuck in wool you can’t get them out.

Fortunately this plant is very easy to get rid of. The stems aren’t tough and one chop with the shovel will take care of it. These are in the burn pile now.

I have done pretty well at getting rid of most of this spiny cocklebur, but missed the plants in this area. Why is it bad? Take a look at a close-up.

Not only is it spiny, but those burs stick to wool like velcro as well as having an extra sharp point on the end. In the summer I hoe all the small cockleburs that i see. Even though I chopped and will burn all of these plants today they left hundreds of cockleburs (seeds) behind on the ground.

Here is a lesson in seed dispersal.

O’Keefe and Courbet weaving

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I wove these projects a few weeks ago but just got them finished–that is, I wet-finished them. When a weaving comes off the loom it is not considered finished until it has undergone some kind of treatment. That could be anything from gentle soaking in water and spreading out flat to dry to vigorous processing in the washing machine and dryer. Whatever finishing process is chosen it changes the character of the project, sometimes dramatically. The finishing method should be factored in to the planning of the project.

This is a waffle weave blanket woven in Jaggerspun Lambspun wool that I sell. It is machine washable and won’t felt with washing. It does change character however.

This is the same blanket after going through the washer and dryer.  The inspiration for this blanket is the following Georgia O’Keefe painting. I started with white yarn and sprinkled dye powder over the yarn to get the varigated shades.

I love the subtle colors of this painting, but I also love the vibrant ones in the next.

Seascape by Courbet. I used the same washable wool yarn for this project. I wound the warp and then dyed it. Here is the finished v-shawl.

Van Gogh blankets

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After the ruana project (which still has not been sewn, fringed, or washed) it was a relief to do something easier. This project was inspired by this Van Gogh painting.

I dyed yarn. This is Jaggerspun Superlamb, a washable Merino yarn. I usually don’t leave white spaces in the space-dyed yarn, but there is a lot of white in the painting so I thought that I needed it here.

I warped the loom for two blankets in an advancing twill.

The color in the detail shot is more true. It’s a soft blanket with a nice drape.

Weaving day

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I spent most of the day at the loom weaving a project that it taking way longer than I expected. I planned to weave a ruana for the show coming up and I based the measurements on the ruana that my daughter wove way back when she was 11 years old.

When I took the measurements of this piece I assumed that we had warped this using double weave–to come up with a double width fabric in the back and two separate layers for the fronts. That was assumption #1 that was wrong. I planned colors of stripes to coincide with two twill patterns. As I was winding the bouts of warp I put them in the raddle for my AVL 8-shaft loom. It occurred to me part way through that I needed 16 shafts to weave the 2 layers that I planned. OK, no problem. Since I hadn’t yet wound the warp onto the beam I could move the warp to the 16-shaft AVL.   This was a tedious project to thread. With the help of the computer (and a lot of trial and error) I figured out how to thread this and then have the twill lines reverse on the bottom layer.

I also used the computer to figure out how avoid 3-thread floats between the transitions of the two patterns. This is one layer (shafts 1-8). I did another draft for the 2nd layer (shafts 9-16) and then interspersed the tie-up to create double width and again for two layers.

Here is the fabric on the loom. I am using the Zephyr 50% wool/50% silk yarn that I carry in my shop. The big mistake I made was planning this at double weave instead of just weaving one really long strip and sewing them up the back. My assumption about the original ruana was wrong–we did it just that way, not double weave. I’d have been finished a long time ago if I had woven one long strip. The double width isn’t so bad except that the yarn is so dense that I had to pay close attention to make sure that threads weren’t catching. Here is the system I rigged up for that.

A glance in the mirror each time I change sheds shows if it is clear or not.

The harder part is now that I’m weaving the two separate layers. Two shuttles is much slower than just half the speed of using one shuttle. I think I have another couple of hours tomorrow and then this warp will be finished and I can move on to other projects to finish in the next two weeks.

Here is a weaving project that is very different from the ruana. In a previous post I showed this pile of mohair and yarn scraps that was working on in Oregon:

This is what it turned into. Thanks to the ever willing Shelby for modeling. (Without a model it would probably not look much different than how the fiber looks piled on the table.)

A few days ago I wove another.

This will be in the Artful Fiber show at the Artery to accompany this painting:

There is something about this painting that makes me think of a fluffy boa.

Publicity photos

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I have been asked to participate in an event at UC Davis on November 20 called New Media: Making Agricultural Marketing Personal. Chris was home so I asked him to take some photos. I had a vision of me sitting in the field with a laptop with sheep all around me. First I thought I’d use the ewe lambs that I’ve set aside for Rusty to use. They weren’t so insterested in just staying with me.

Then I tried the ewes in the pasture (and I bribed them with grain).