No, I don’t mean the flower, Amaryllis. This Amaryllis is a spotted donkey. She arrived on Saturday. She was foaled in a sheep pen in Iowa and has lived with Jacob sheep all her life. She will continue duty as a guard donkey here, but also as my equine buddy.
Amaryllis
Sheep investigating Amaryllis
Zena
I don’t know what happened. I just wrote the post about the pasture. I finished up with a paragraph about the blankets I wove. That paragraph got attached to the previous one and the photo didn’t show up. Here is the photo.
Also, it seems that the normal formatting of all the previous posts is gone. I don’t know why. I sure get frustrated wtih this stuff. Any ideas?
So what to do about it? I could try to get some cows in here. If they didn’t eat it at least they’d trample it. But I’m trying to make something work with the sheep. I have started feeding hay out here. I break the flakes of hay into smaller pieces and place it in strategic places in the tall grass. The photo below shows those same posts after 2 feedings in that area. (Note the wooden post in the background of each picture.) The sheep didn’t eat all that grass, but a good part of it is trampled down and hopefully broken up enough that something will grow through it after the winter rains.
The next two photos show the same plot looking north. You can barely see the black plastic posts in the first photo, but they’re obvious in the second.
Pasture plot, north view before grazing
North view after 24 hours
I took this photo of Houdini and told my husband that I thought he looked like an evil cartoon character.
Dan replied that he looked like one of the Power Rangers, which he just happened to see on Saturday morning. (I guess it came on after This Old House.) Now that it has rained and the sheep are walking around in tall wet grass a lot of the color from the marking harness has come off of Houdini, but in the first few days of breeding season I was ready to call him Alien Ram because he had a green tinge all over his wool.
When I’m not dealing with sheep, hay, classes, etc, I’m supposed to be weaving. I finally got a huge job finished. These are 4 queen size blankets and one double blanket that I just shipped on Friday. They are woven from wool grown by the customer’s family and she wanted blankets for her family members. They don’t look too impressive in the photo, but it was a lot of time.
Now the fun stuff (while my computer is still letting me download photos–don’t know what happened overnight). I like making these V-shawls and here are some friends helping to model them.
And this is my son making his escape after I made him take these photos.
Below is a striking shawl made by one of my students in the last v-shawl class I taught. This is her 2nd weaving!
It rained last night–not a lot, but enough to get rid of the dust and make everything smell fresh. This is the first rain since sometime in March! We were due. The best thing about the rain was that my hay was all in the barn BEFORE it started, thanks my husband and son. I had 440 bales waiting to go in the barn. This is just half of it.
haystack
Well. I had a lot more photos to post but my computer is running way too slowly. It took me 10 minutes to get this one photo into the blog. I’ve been shelling walnuts while I’m waiting in between clicks. So I’ll sign off for now.
I don’t know why my last post didn’t come out like I thought. Because I was falling asleep sitting at the computer? Here is the photo of the Watusi steer.
Watusi steer--and you thought Jacobs had big horns!
Milking Shorthorn Best 3
The middle week of the State Fair is Dairy week. If Chris goes to work for the Forest Service next summer like he plans then this was his last State Fair. He showed his 6 goats and Trista came through again. She was not only selected Champion Toggenburg, she also won Supreme Champion Dairy Goat. That’s over all the goats shown in the Junior show. Way to go, Trista and Chris! You can’t see the belt buckle in this photo but it has a bear in the middle with CA poppies all around it. It’s gorgeous.
Trista-Supreme Champion
The sheep show was over Labor Day weekend. Every since last year I’ve been trying to plan a display that would win the $750 Marketing Award. I spent an inordinant amount of time in the last two weeks before the show thinking about this display. I knew I needed to upgrade my posters and I learned how to use more of the features of PowerPoint to do that. I even found myself taking close-up photos of cement, sand, fence boards, etc after i learned how to make my own background for the posters.
Here are two photos of my display. On the right, friends Mel and Marilyn demonstrate Navajo weaving. They demonstrated on Sunday and drew huge crowds. Several friends helped me staff my display throughout the fair. I had so many items on display (yarn, lambskins, etc) that I didn’t dare leave the area unattended. I wove much of the time I was there-got 3 wool V-shawls woven. The work and the time paid off. I didn’t win 1st place Marketing Award–I got 3rd. But I won an award for Best Program Directed at the Public. I also won the Herdsman award for flocks of 9 head or less and the most prestigious award is 3rd place for Best Educational Exhibit over all 3 weeks of the fair and all livestock species!
What about the sheep show? After all, that’s why we’re there. Last year I got the fair to offer a division for “Heritage” breeds. That was a huge show and it was split this year. The wool sheep had their own division, but the “Heritage and American” breeds show still includes sheep that are awfully hard to judge in the same show. I was the only Jacob exhibitor and competed against Tunis (a large-frame meat sheep), St. Croix (a hair sheep), a few Scottish Blackface, and Shetlands. In most of the classes you can enter 2 sheep, so I got 3rds, behind the Tunis. There was only 1 yearling ram representing each breed though. So my ram, Ranger, got 2nd behind the Tunis and he was able to enter the Champion drive. The yearling Tunis was Champion, but Ranger was awarded Reserve Champion.
Ranger in the yearling ram class
Tunis and Jacob entries for the Flock class.
An amazing longhorn
The State Fair is now over. It seemed to consume my life for about 3 weeks. For me State Fair begins with bringing pregnant ewes to the fair. I bred out of season to provide lambs for the State Fair Livestock Nursery that is run by the UCD VMTH (Veterinary Medicine Teaching Hospital). In March I bred 5 ewes thinking that I might end up with 3 pregnant ewes. Ultrasounds confirmed that all 5 were pregnant!
Mary and lambs
The Livestock Nursery is one of the most popular exhibits at the State Fair and new Jacob lambs are always a hit. I ended up with 12 new lambs.
Last Thursday I loaded 9 sheep in the trailer and 5 of us crammed into my pickup with all of our stuff in the back, including my tack box and display racks and boxes of yarn and fiber for the vendor building, and we started for Eugene, Oregon. We met a friend along I-5 and transferred her ewe and ram (Meridian Rocky, originally from me) to my trailer. We made it to Eugene about 6:30 and settled the sheep into the barn.
This was a first visit for my friends to Black Sheep Gathering. I think this is one of my favorite events. Where else can you find sheep (wool sheep at that!) and shopping all under one roof? The atmosphere is laid back and the weather is mild. And I get to visit with friends that I probably won’t see otherwise. In fact one friend was gracious enough to house all 5 of us at her place!
One of the highlights of the weekend is the Spinners Lead contest. In this contest participants show off their handspun or otherwise handmade pieces and bring the sheep or goat with them in the ring. Click to enlarge this thumbnail. This is me modeling my woven sweater and my sheep modeling her braided Jacob wool halter. I must tell the story about this sweater. I wove 2 blankets of handspun yarn and had a little warp left over. I wove that and thought it would make a great sweater. Not enough! I made another warp and wove enough for sleeves. I cut and sewed the pieces of the sweater together but figured that I could finish the knitted ribbing in Oregon. After all, what else was i going to do? And I didn’t have time before I left. When I sat down to work on the sweater I realized that I hadn’t serged the neck edge and lower edge. At the suggestion of a friend, I found a sewing machine store (Eugene Sewing and Vacuum) and asked if I could use a serger. They let me use it and I ended up finishing the sweater with time to spare! I also made a halter for my lamb out of Jacob sliver that I had braided.
I was surprised to be awarded third place in the “Animal Owner” category. My friend, Shannon, won first for her felted vest with Jacob sheep and an apple tree needle-felted on the back. This photo shows all of the Jacob entrants. There is a bagpipe cover, 2 shawls, my sweater, Shannon’s vest, and a felted ring-bearer’s pillow carried by Shannon’s 4-year old son wearing his wedding finery.
The trip was great fun, but the drive home seemed LONG. We got back at 3:30 a.m. I think I’m still catching up on sleep. We came home to smoky conditions. There are fires burning all over California and we can’t even see the hills near Vacaville, let alone the sky.
I am planning on this trip again next year. Anyone up for an adventure?
Check out the eggs I collected yesterday. The photo almost doesn’t do this egg justice. The two smaller eggs are normal sized. They weighed 2.1 and 2.2 ounces. The big one weighed 4.1 ounces! It wouldn’t fit in any egg carton so I decided to use it for a batch of cookies. It replaced two eggs in the recipe.
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