Random Farm Photos Again

Posted on September 6, 2026 by Robin

This is my life–trying to work on everything at once, because it all seems important.

I just finished this scarf to have at Lambtown where I’ll be teaching Clasped Warp and Closed Weft

Spinning class Saturday morning. Three new spinners!

I’m trying to organize my life. The basket where I put gloves when I come in from the barn has been NOT organized. I spread all the gloves out to match them up. Then I gathered gloves from the barn. There are pairs on the left. All on the right are single gloves. Most of them are left-hand gloves, so where are all the right-hand gloves? I know that if I get rid of all the singles I’ll start finding others that should have matched. So I’ll probably put these in another box and hang on to them for another 10 years or so. Notice the boots at the top. They have had their last trip to the barn. I’ll salvage the shoe laces to use as ties on the net fence but the boots are going away.

This may not look like much, but it represents several hours of button making. First there is cutting on the band-saw. The cups hold groups of buttons that are all from one horn. I try to keep those together through the process so that they can be sold as sets.

This is the same batch of horns, but now with holes drilled. Now they will go back to the sander and then they will have a finish appleid.

The last three days I have sorted out ewe lambs I’m keeping and put halters on all. I’d like them to be at least semi-halter broke–then if I have to use a halter the sheep won’t panic .

While doing so I led some outside to get a better look at color. There is an obvious difference between the black and white lambs and all the lilacs.

Lilac twins, the last born this spring. I named all the lambs last night. These two are Cosmos and Dahlia.

I spent time today inventorying the hedgerow after replacing some of the plants that didn’t make it. These are rhizomes from Johnson grass a very invasive and obnoxious grass. I can’t dig it out of the whole pasture, but I can dig it out of the fenceline along the hedgerow. It is important to get the clumps and these tubers out. they continue to grow and sprout new plants–I’m sure that I didn’t get everything.

Close to Home…Yarn with a Story

Posted on November 11, 2014 by Robin

For many months I have been preparing for a show at The Artery in Davis, CA. The Artery is an a cooperative gallery with about 70 member artists and I have sold my work there for over ten years. The show runs from November 7 to December 1. I hope that local people will be able to visit.Jacob blankets above and on the rocking chair (my mom’s) on the right. Gray blanket on the left chair uses “Mom’s yarn” (see a future blog post on that). The others are wool from other Solano County farms.

The best way to explain this show is to reprint my “Artist’s Statement” here. My blog is usually mostly photos because that’s the kind of blog that I like to read but I hope that you will take the time to read the following because it explains the concept behind the work in the show. I’ll throw in a few photos, but will display others in later blog posts.

Blankets woven from yarn grown by Imperial Stock Ranch in Oregon.The story about this yarn will be in a later post.

Artist’s Statement: In 2010 I became involved in the Fibershed movement by donating yarn produced from my flock of Jacob sheep to Rebecca Burgess whose goal was to wear, for a year, only clothes sourced entirely from an area within 150 miles of where she lived. That means that the fiber (and any dye) was grown, the yarn was spun, the cloth created, and the garment sewn locally! Imagine doing that—it’s not easy!

Why bother? Have you looked at your clothing labels and thought about the impacts of the way in which we clothe ourselves? The true cost of inexpensive clothing is high when you consider the social and environmental impacts on a global scale. (China produces 52% of the world’s textiles.)

Rebecca’s personal challenge led to the creation of the on-line Fibershed Marketplace in 2011, and in 2012 the Fibershed (501c3) with the mission “… to change the way we clothe ourselves by supporting the creation of local textile cultures that enhance ecological balance, and utilize regional agriculture while strengthening local economies and communities.” In other words, by embracing the Fibershed concept, we support the idea of using locally grown and locally made textiles and encouraging the development of Fibersheds all over the world.

Education is an integral part of the Fibershed movement—educating the consumer about the environmental, economic, and social benefits of embracing the Fibershed concept. Imagine the Slow Food movement applied to textiles!

Close to Home… Does that mean down the block, across town, or within the U.S.A? Each yarn used in this show has a story. Some were grown by my own sheep, some by my neighbors, and some in other parts of Solano County. One is grown by a long-established Oregon ranch and another is grown by several ranches in the Pacific Northwest and dyed with plant dyes in Napa County. A few pieces are woven of yarn handspun and dyed by my mom many years ago. It was a challenge to stay true to the Fibershed concept when I needed commercial fabrics for pillows. (One of the many Fibershed goals is to bring mills back to our area that will commercially produce fabrics not locally produced now.) I did the best I could by using fabric and pillow forms made in the U.S.A. and some pillows use my home-grown wool for the pillow itself.

I wove or felted all the wool fabric in the show and each of the fibers have a story. Some were grown close to home and other evoke memories of home. The pieces are simple because my focus is on the fiber and the yarn. Enjoy the photos, read the stories, and think about the stories that your textiles would tell.

Photography Fun–A Weekly Challenge

Posted on January 8, 2013 by Robin

Not that I need a another thing to add to the to-do list…but I saw a blog that has a weekly photo challenge and I thought it might be fun to participate. This might only last a week–we’ll see. This week’s challenge by A Word in Your Ear is Clouds. Without working very hard I could go back just a couple of weeks to find these photos that I took the day after I got my new lens from Santa.This is the field across the road from my house and the next one was taken just up the road.What is a sunset without clouds? Notice the fog rolling over the hills–fog is just clouds on the ground, right? These sunset photos are taken from my barn looking to the west. The last photo, below, is another that I took from the field across the road.