Lambtown Sheep Show with Farm Club

Posted on October 19, 2023 by Robin

One of the Lambtown events is the sheep show. I live so close that I like to participate and I know that people like to see my sheep there. But I knew that I couldn’t be a vendor AND show sheep. I told the FarmClub that I would get sheep to Lambtown if they wanted to handle the show. They were willing.

This was simpler than some other shows because there were no group classes and, as at many shows, you could only enter yearlings and lambs. I sold my yearling ram at Estes Park in June so we didn’t even have to worry about who would want to handle a ram. I entered two ram lambs, two ewe lambs, and two yearling ewes. It’s the yearling ewes in this photo. These are twins born in 2022.

Farm Club members set up a display about Jacob sheep and Farm Club. All I had to do was bring a few of the panels that we use at State Fair and the box of photos and signs. I forgot that I’d be using the Meridian Jacobs sign in my vendor booth so Lisa used her t-shirt to indicate Meridian Jacobs. Clever!

I have to explain about that panel in the center. When you wind a warp on a loom you pack the layers of yarn with paper as you roll it on the beam. During one of the Sheep-to-Shawl competitions a few years ago FC member, Alison, thought that the paper used for rolling the warp could be made more interesting. As the shawl was woven, this message emerged from the back of the loom. Isn’t that a great idea?I thought it was worth laminating and using as a sign.

I did not get to see the sheep show, but many Farm Club members were there and some took the following photos.

Beth and Marina did most of the showing. The competition was from a Shetland breeder. This is the ewe lamb class.

This is the ram lamb class. The green on the ram is because our breeding season had already started and this ram lamb was wearing a marking harness when he was with his group of ewes.

Beth ended up with a challenging sheep. This ewe decided to go on strike.

We ended up with Champion Ram and Champion Ewe of the Primitive Breeds division.

Deborah helped out when a third person was needed for the champion class. Once again Beth had a less cooperative sheep, but handled him well.

Dan spent all afternoon driving the tractor and wagon that transported people back and forth from the vendor halls to the livestock area.

This was very popular not only with adults that appreciated the rides, but with kids who liked to sit in the front. Dan took extra laps to give some of those kids more time sitting on the front bench.

Lambtown 2023 was a big success for all of us. The crew that put the show on this year is to be commended for the time they spent on planning and organizing and the professionalism they brought to the event.

Lambtown 2023

Posted on October 19, 2023 by Robin

In the last post I wrote about the class I taught at Lambtown a couple of weeks ago. Now I want to share photos of my vendor booth and the sheep show.

I am still experimenting with posting from my iPad which isn’t as easy as from my computer. These photos are all entered as Medium size—that’s just a note to myself for when I review this later.

Bales of straw with the letters that say Lambtown in the early morning.

I ended up with a booth and a half space and now I’m spoiled. Will I ever want to go back to a single booth space? It’s hard to get a good feel for it from this photo. I used a rack in front to hold handwoven blankets. There wouldn’t not have been room in a single booth. There was plenty of room for people to wander in and really look at everything. There were so many people at Lambtown this year that I didn’t take this photo until after 4 on Saturday when I could finally step out of the booth. The following photos are some of the things I had in my booth.

I spent a lot of time the last couple of weeks packaging the flowers I grew and used for my own dyeing this year.

I had forgotten I had these in my shop on the farm because there is always something in front of them.

Year to Remember blankets, so called because I will custom weave these for people who want to commemorate a special year. These two use the same stripe pattern (although you can’t tell with them folded in this photo) but different colorways. The one on the left uses all naturally dyed yarns.

The hemp bag I made and wrote an article about for the most recent article of Little Looms.

The newest product in the shop and online.

The 2023 wool I just got back from the mill. I haven’t had time to put this online yet.

I have an odd variety of buttons in the shop and I brought these to Lambtown.

I brought four sheep skulls to Lambtown and sold them all. I have more at home I haven’t had time to finish.

Some of the silk scarves I’ve printed recently.

Timm Ranch yarn dyed with Indigo, hollyhock, madder, dahlia, and cosmos.

I had my own horn buttons with me and I love the way Siobhan used these two to create a closure for her woven piece.

That’s it for now. One more post for the sheep show.

Link

I have already moved onto the next adventure, but I missed writing posts about the last few and I like my blog posts (scrapbook) to be in order. I usually use my computer but I’ll experiment with writing on my iPad. If it’s easy then maybe I can get caught up and move on to this week’s event.

Lambtown Festival in Dixon, California (and only 10 minutes from the farm) is held the first weekend of October. The main event is on the weekend but classes were held for four days. I taught Clasped Warp on the Rigid Heddle Loom on Thursday. There were 9 students so 9 different warps.

NOTE. I have a way of exporting photos and uploading them on my computer that I know what to expect of the photos. I am experimenting here with sizes. The first one is uploaded “small”, the next one is “medium” and the third will be “large”.

With clasped warp you wind one yarn from one direction and one yarn from the other and they are joined (or clasped) in the middle. Direct warping is the only way that it makes sense to do this so working on a rigid heddle loom is great.

We could fit two people at each table working on opposite sides. I like how often people’s yarn choices match their clothing.

Once the looms are warped everyone sits at their own space to weave. In the past I have taught this as a half day class. Students learned the warping technique and started weaving but most of the weaving was done at home. This class was scheduled for morning and afternoon sessions.

Only a few finished weaving their projects, but that was OK because they all owned the looms. We took a class photo with warps mostly done but not off the looms yet.

Here are two that were finished and cut off the loom.

This was a fun class. I’ll be teaching it next summer at Convergence in Kansas as well as scheduling it at my place before then.

Lambtown 2017

Posted on October 14, 2017 by Robin

Lambtown was last weekend. A lot has happened since then–I’ve been on a little get-away to Lake Tahoe while at the same time there are still terrible fires raging to the west of us. But this post is to share some photos from Lambtown.

This is one reason that I looked forward so much to my Lake Tahoe trip. The Lambtown weekend was non-stop and those of you who go to shows as vendors know that it’s not just the event, but the time leading up to it and the time trying to get organized afterwards. One vendor described it to someone by saying, “Imagine packing up everything from your living room, loading it into a trailer, setting it up in a new location, two days later taking it all down and loading the trailer, then unloading and setting up your living room again.”

The morning of the vendor set-up day I taught a class, “Getting Fancy with the Rigid Heddle Loom”.

This is the booth, taken by Dona the next day. The wall to the left showcases the yarn that I’ve been dyeing for the last couple of months along with some of the finished pieces.

This is some of that yarn. I’m still amazed that the peachy looking yarn is the second batch through the coreopsis pot that produced that rust colored yarn next to it.

I don’t have many photos of anything else at Lambtown because I was so busy either in the booth or teaching or at the end of Sunday, in the barn showing sheep.

On the second morning I taught a class called Warping Your Loom at Warp Speed. I didn’t want to teach longer than an hour Saturday morning because the point of having a vendor booth is to be there and sell things. In the class showed how I can wind a 5-yard chenille warp, get it on the loom and ready to weave in a short time. At home I can do it in 50 minutes. In this case it was about an hour and a quarter and I hadn’t tied it on to the front bar. But I had been talking and teaching through that time. I think that wasn’t bad. The one thing that I forgot to bring (after remembering at 11:30 the night before that I should have packed the warping frame) were the ties to secure the warp chain. I used up what extra thread was around and then someone pointed out that I had baling twine hanging out of my pocket. That worked.

I had also brought a few things to enter in the fiber arts show. That is one of the ponchos that will be in the Artery show.

Sunday morning I brought a sign for Buster’s pen.

Then I taught a three-hour class on learning to use the rigid heddle room and learning to work with rags (fabric strips) at the same time.

It’s fun to see how the fabric looks when it is cut and woven.

Don’t you love how this fabric works up in a woven piece?

I’ll do another post about the sheep show.

Lambtown, then Spinzilla

Posted on October 7, 2016 by Robin

I haven’t posted since I was in Texas over a week ago. I had a great time with my granddaughter but what did I bring home? Not a puppy. Not a longhorn. A cold. So I felt pretty awful for several days, but I’m back and trying to catch up with things. (Although I’m catching up on computer stuff early in the morning because the cough kept me from going back to sleep.)

Lambtown, the annual sheep/wool festival in Dixon was last weekend. It’s only 15 minutes from home so it really couldn’t be easier. But being a vendor at a fiber festival is never easy.

It is always a challenge to decide what to bring and how to fit it in a 10’x10′ space (which really wasn’t this year, especially when you subtract the space with the post in the back corner). This year I focused on products that no one else would have.

I brought my brand new lambskins (incredibly soft and fluffy), brand new handwoven ponchos, and Jacob fiber and yarn and buttons.I brought my new farm photos in 2 sizes and as notecards. There were also my new calendars. (As I’m writing this I realize that there are a lot of new things to get listed on the website.) I also brought rigid heddle looms and weaving equipment. marv-and-honey

In addition I brought sheep. I had chosen to not bring sheep because it’s just too much work to have a vendor booth and sheep in the barn, but the show organizer asked me to bring my sheep. With the help of Farm Club it all worked out. The Primitive Breeds Sheep Show wasn’t very big but there was some Shetland competition. Honey and Marv were awarded Champion Ewe and Champion Ram in the division. They make a nice looking pair.

As Lambtown ended, Spinzilla week began. From the website: “Spinzilla is a global event where teams and individuals compete in a friendly challenge to see who can spin the most yarn in a week!” This is the fourth year that I have hosted a team for this program that raises money for youth needlearts mentoring programs all over the country.Not all of our spinners are local, but some who are showed up here Monday morning.

We had to take a puppy break at one point when my sister-in-law visited with her new 2-month old Queensland heeler. image_medium

Spinners are continuing to spin at home all week, but on Wednesday several showed up here again. The weather was nice enough to be outside. Notice the wheel in the background.

I had seen this on the way to the bank in Dixon on Thursday evening. All it needed was a drive band and a cotter pin to hold the wheel in place.

Alison and I got it going. I had figured that I’d resell it because I just don’t have room in the shop or the house. But it is way too cool. I’ll have to hang onto it for awhile at least.

The Week Following Dental Surgery–rams, Lambtown, Fibershed

Posted on October 15, 2015 by Robin

Not a very good title… and it doesn’t describe what I want to share in this post, but dental surgery was the event on Monday that set the tone for the week.

I stayed on the codeine less than 24 hours because I don’t like feeling so…well, drugged. I didn’t feel too bad on Wednesday and some Farm Club friends came to help me set up breeding groups. It is always a challenge to find enough places to put the groups where there is no fence-line contact between rams.I left Faulkner in his area but expanded it to include the run next to it.

Ringo Ringo got the most ewes so he had the pasture.Rotor, one of the lambs born in March, went with his ewes to the horse pasture. We wondered if he’d be able to reach those ewes, but he’s had no problem. I don’t have a photo of Nash, the lilac ram. He went to the field behind the shop. Crosby and Alex were left in the ram pen.The non-breeding group includes the ewes to be bred in February for lambing at the State Fair, their lambs, some of the ewe lambs that I’m keeping, other ewe lambs for sale, and this year 4 ewe lambs that are sold but haven’t left yet. It’s a lot of sheep to keep away from the rams but I barricaded them in the area around the barn. white-tailed kites Our resident white-tailed kites, seen from the barn.

One of the adult rams, Alex, was picked up by his new owner on Thursday so I put the few remaining ram lambs with Crosby to keep him company for the day. On Friday I took 7 sheep, including Crosby, Nash, and Rotor to Lambtown for the sheep show on Sunday. Normally I am a vendor at Lambtown but this year there was a conflict with an event I had really wanted to attend and where I knew that I’d sell well. So I took sheep for the weekend but attended Fibershed on Saturday. It’s a good thing. I probably should have stayed home entirely but at least the Fibershed event was easier than doing a full vendor booth at Lambtown.Here are two of the sheep pens at Lambtown and my meager display.Saturday was the Grow Your Jeans event that was the culmination of over a year’s planning and work by the Fibershed team. There are photos and a description of the work involved in growing cotton and indigo in the nearby Capay Valley and the dyeing, weaving, and pattern-making of these locally produced jeans at this link. The Grow Your Jeans event featured these jeans as well as “grass-fed tops”, the shirts and accessories worn with them on the straw-bale fashion show runway. The new felt banner was made by FC friend, Jackie, of Sheep to Shop.

Prior to the fashion show attendees could shop at the vendor booths and eat fabulous local food. (At least it looked fabulous. I stuck to my yogurt and cottage cheese.)I brought handwoven pieces, horn buttons, and lambskins. I did very well as far as sales, but, unfortunately by this point, I was not in the best of shape. I just wanted to be home on the couch. These pillows are stuffed with local wool in an cover of organic cotton. They both sold. This is my “grass-fed top” on the left. It is Timm Ranch wool woven in 16-shaft huck lace. The weft is dyed with osage orange from across the road.The fashion show took place in an old dairy barn. Prior to the show, Rebecca and the others involved in creating the jeans told about their parts in the project.I stood just outside to get a photo of the model wearing my shawl. I stepped back inside to see the last part of the show. Two of the models came out carrying this flag.Along with all of the other aspects of Fibershed that Rebecca spearheads, she has also been involved with the re-introduction of hemp as a valued agricultural crop in Kentucky. It’s a long story and you can read some interesting articles here. This is one of five flags to be woven from the veteran-grown hemp project. They use Sally Fox’s California grown cotton for warp and Kentucky hemp for weft. The first flag went to Farm Aid and this is the second one. I thought it was a fabulous way to end the evening’s program. Kind of gives you chills.

I am not doing justice here to the whole event. Everything that Fibershed puts on is exceedingly well done and the message is so important. I am grateful to be involved in this movement even in a small way.

It was a long drive home to Bolinas that night and then there was still Lambtown the next day. I had a ride to and from so started in on the codeine. On Saturday Farm Club friends had been on the winning Sheep to Shawl team. This is the fabulous blanket that they spun and wove.

After the sheep show I doubled up on the codeine and waited for my husband to come drive the sheep home.

Meridian Jacobs' Blog

Life on the farm and at the loom.

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