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Trip to Santa Barbara – Part 2

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I left off the last post with only a couple of the dozens of photos I took of Hebe’s wonderful creations.

Kenna and I took the dogs to the beach in the afternoon. There is an off-leash beach to the delight of dozens of dogs.

This was Rusty’s first time at the beach.  It didn’t take him too long to figure out that he shouldn’t drink the water.

There were a lot of pelicans and it seemed that the fishing was good. I put on my amateur wildlife photographer hat. After I cropped these photos to enlarge the birds I was surprised to see how direct the approach is when they are going after fish.

A group photo of Kenna and her dog, Molly, and Rusty and me.

Next stop for the day was Canzelle Alpacas in Carpinteria, not far from Santa Barbara. Kenna has taught Carol Ann, the owner, to spin  and we’re discussing fiber classes for some of Carol Ann’s customers.

Kenna lives in an area surrounded by the Los Padres National Forest. When you hear about raging southern CA wildfires, some of them are right here. Two years ago thousands of acres burned in the Gap Fire, the edge of which is just up the road from Kenna’s house.

We took a hike through some of the burned area and it is incredible to see the regrowth of vegetation. The CA chaparral can become impenetrable after years with no fire. It is a tragedy when homes are destroyed by fire, but it’s probably not a bad thing for wild areas to burn periodically. It is hard to manage an area for both wild ecosystems and human habitation.

There was fog  on the coast this morning but we were above it.

I drove home in the afternoon and visited another friend (since 6th grade!) along the way.

This is a view out my car window. I’m glad to live somewhere that has such a diversity of landscapes. I never tire of the views.

It would seem that Rusty was worn out from the weekend. However, this is how he always travels. In fact if my ice chest weren’t on the floor that is where he’d be. He doesn’t pant, doesn’t look out the window. He just sleeps.  Not a bad way to travel if the scenery doesn’t fascinate you.

Trip to Santa Barbara – Part 1

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There has been plenty to blog about but not enough hours in the day. I keep meaning to share photos I took in Santa Barbara when I made a quick sheep-delivery trip. People from San Diego  met me to pick up sheep and then I spent the rest of the weekend visiting with my friend, Kenna. We crammed a lot into Sunday of that weekend.

Double checking before I left that I had the important things–my dog and my spinning wheel.

We had breakfast and a walk on the beach with my cousin, William, who lives in Santa Barbara.

Next stop was the Santa Barbara Mission where it was the date of the annual I Madonarri festival, a fund raiser for the mission. This is based on the tradition of Italian street painting. Local businesses pay for spaces in the parking lot and then fill the spaces with chalk art. Look at the incredible detail in this design.

This is not just your regular side-walk chalk.

Aren’t these incredible?

After this Kenna and I went to her friend’s house nearby. Hebe is an incredible person–she is a quilter, weaver, jeweler, felter, painter, and probably more. She was recovering from back surgery but was gracious enough to take her to her basement workshop and show us some of her treasures.

This is a recently completed weaving.

Hebe has completed 10 incredible felted figures and will have a show after she has finished 12. I can’t remember the names of these ladies (and men), but the figures are created with humorous themes in mind. Attention to detail is incredible. You can’t tell in this photo but the tennies are covered with sparkly red sequins.

The felted rocks alone are amazing, let alone the rest of the creation.

The afternoon’s adventures will come later.

Still weaving

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I haven’t written about weaving lately, but I’m still working at the loom. I have orders from 3 regular customers for 9 baby blankets. I just finished a warp with 10 blankets.

Last week I finished an order for wool throws. This customer had her yarn spun at Yolo Wool Mill and wanted 5 different blankets. Sometimes it is necessary to add a lot of spinning oil to the wool during processing. The yarn isn’t very appealing in that state, but woven blankets aren’t truly finished until they are ‘wet finished’. In wet finishing  the  oil is removed and the blanket is fulled. Take a look at the before and after photos of these blankets.

I calculated a sett of 5.5 epi. I used a 6-dent reed and left every 12th dent open. After I started weaving I worried that you would see that empty space in all 5 blankets and that would distract from the woven pattern. I didn’t need to worry.  In the photo below you can sort of see that line, but when you see the blanket you focus on the diagonal twill and don’t even notice the vertical line.

Above is the before and after of another twill blanket.

Plain weave. Before fulling is above and after fulling is below.

This is one of my favorite weave structures. I was concerned about the finishing of this blanket. The yarn that I got from the mill was on cones and in skeins. The skeined yarn was so much oilier than the coned yarn  it almost seemed to be a different batch. You can see the difference in the photo. In fact, there was so much tacky grease that I had to pull a length of yarn out of the shuttle with every pass or my end-feed shuttle would go flying off the loom (guess that’s because I have a fly-shuttle loom!) because the yarn wouldn’t feed out properly. I was relieved after I washed the blanket that there was no difference in the fulling of the two yarns.

Nostalgia at Feather Falls

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Last weekend my husband and I chose the absolute best day to go hiking in the Sierra foothills. Flowers were blooming in abundance, everything was green, and the weather was perfect. I hadn’t been to Feather Falls in years–not since we carried one (or was it two?) of the kids on the trail. (And now the youngest is 19.)

I have a lot of photos on my Facebook page, but here are a few of them.

There is a lot of poison oak along the trail. We could avoid it, but Rusty didn’t seem to care. I knew that i’d need to give him a bath when we got home.

I wish I remembered all my wild flowers, but I enjoy them even if I don’t remember all their names.

This delicate looking flower is a Ceanothus–Deer Brush or California lilac and the flowers cover bushes that are 6-8 feet high.

There were so many lupines that in places you could smell the sweet scent along the trail.

This is another kind of lupine that was closer to the falls.

Sticky monkey flower.

Feather Falls. The photo doesn’t do it justice–600 feet of plunging water.

Sorting lambs

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Today was the day to start evaluating lambs. I need to choose lambs for shows, for sale, and the ones that I want to keep. When they are all together and mixed up with the ewes I have a hard time comparing them. Two friends came over today to help with sorting and to find out the criteria I use to select lambs for sale or show.

Rusty and Mobi hoped that they would get to help also.

First we separated the ewe and ram lambs. Then we separated the 2 horn and 4 horn ewes. I sorted out some that I have decided to keep and some that will not be registered because they are too light. We narrowed the field down to lambs that I will offer for sale and/or will show. I need to figure out which lambs to take to Black Sheep Gathering in June, the Solano Co. Fair in June, and the CA State Fair in July.

This is the group of 4-horn ewe lambs that  are available for sale or show.

This is the group of ram lambs before we started sorting them.

The ewe lambs were glad to head back to the pasture.

How I have spent 22 Mother’s Days

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The Dixon May Fair is the longest-running fair in California. It is always Mother’s Day weekend. My oldest son started showing dairy cattle in 1988 and I’ve had kids at the fair ever since.  The kids can show as FFA members for one year after they finish  high school so this was my youngest son’s last show. He was at the fair from Tuesday through Sunday and left Sunday night for his job on a hotshot crew north of Redding.

Chris has shown dairy goats each year since he started in 4-H.  He sold some of his goats last summer when he left for the fire-fighting job, but had two two-year old milkers at the fair this year. Chris is showing Devan and a friend showed Denise.

This was a very small show, but Devan won Champion…

…and Best Doe in Show. Chris showed her dam at the CA State Fair two years ago and won Champion Toggenburg.

On Sunday Chris competed in Supreme Showmanship, in which the showmanship winners of each species compete.

Each participant shows sheep,

beef cattle, dairy cattle, meat goats, dairy goats, and swine. Chris won second place in this event. And then it was over. Chris rushed home to leave for the job. I went back to the fair to get the goats when they were released. That’s it! Not as big an adjustment as last year when Chris left home for the job for the first time, but now my years of 4-H & FFA Mom is over.

But I’m still a mom. Here is the Mother’s Day present that Chris gave me!!!!

Irrigation time again

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I live on the western edge of the Central Valley in CA.  We get winter rain and it’s dry all summer. The only way that things stay green here is through irrigation. One reason that we wanted this property was because it was part of the Solano Irrigation District and we could get irrigation water without having an ag well.

When I order water the water tender opens a valve at the west end of this ditch (left in the photo). This is not on our property, but the water flows down this ditch and then onto our property by opening the valve at this end.

The water flows through a pipe that goes under the fence and the water comes up in this standpipe and out the hole into the ditch in the pasture.

This view is still looking west. The water is starting to flow from the standpipe down the ditch at the north end of the property. The ditch turns south and gets the water to the rest of the pasture. The ditch is supposed to have high enough sides that the water is contained and only flows out where I dig a cut-out that lets the water into the pasture. The idea is to open a few areas at a time and be able to fill those cut-outs in as you open more. Ideally the pasture would have just the right amount of slope so that the water would flow evenly. Easier said than done. One problem with our place is that we don’t have the equipment to re-ditch the property. I’m using the same ditch that we had dug (by a neighbor with a tractor and ditcher) when we first started here. I see the alfalfa farmers re-ditch every time they irrigate and I’m jealous. I’ve looked into a pipeline system in which there wouldn’t be a ditch, but a buried pipe with valves that could be open and shut to control the irrigation. Unfortunatly the cost is completely unrealistic for my business. So I keep plugging away with the shovel and hoping for the best.

That is a mowed alfalfa field on the north (top of the photo) and our property is the green field. The standpipe is in the northwest corner of the property and the ditch in one of the photos above is along the north fenceline. You can see the water flowing down the ditch going south and that part of the pasture is already flooded. The sheep have to be in the corrals and barn when I’m irrigating. (So I have to feed them hay for several days every 3-4 weeks. I usually have the water on for 36 hours, but it takes several days for the field to drain enough to turn the sheep back out.)

That ditch that takes the water south dead-ends on this ditch that runs east-west and carries water to the other 5 acres. This view shows the south west corner of the property.

Here is the south east corner. I strip graze this 5 acre pasture. The strips run north-south and are separated by a 3-wire electric fence. You can make out the strips in this photo. See that black thing towards the top? That’s a portable water trough that I plug into the water pipeline that we installed a couple of years ago. The water trough is on one of the fencelines. I have just finished grazing the strips on either side of the water trough. The next two strips are more lush. They are ready to be grazed next. Notice the very pale green in the strip above the water trough? This strip is hard to irrigate and for several years I couldn’t get much water on it. That light green color is medusahead–a very unpalatable grass. Ideally I think burning it would be good, but I don’t think I can do that. We just bought a better heavy-duty weed-eater and I think I’m going to try to stay on top of the medusahead by using the weed-eater. I hope that I can make an impact on it this year. It renders that strip of the pasture unuseable. I noticed tonight that my irrigation water was getting there. I hope that if I can keep the medushead at bay then something else will start growing there.

New Baby Blankets

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I haven’t written much about weaving lately, but I’m getting a few things done. I have woven some baby blankets using SuperLamb. That’s the washable Merino wool  by Jaggerspun that i am selling in the shop. It will be great for baby blankets–very soft and the added advantage of being machine washed and dried.

Here are some of the blankets still on the loom.

And here they are off the loom. These blankets are at The Artery right now.