I don’t have photos of everything I do during the day. Standing at the computer for hours doesn’t make for very exciting photos.
Now that the only ewe lambs left are those that I’m keeping, I wanted to halter break them. I don’t expect them to lead like a horse, but I like to be able to tie them to a fence without them panicking. Also, a couple of these will be going to the Lambtown sheep show at the beginning of October. It will make it easier for my Farm Club crew if the lambs are at least somewhat halter broke.
There is a bit too much giant zucchini. Too bad zucchini isn’t a dye plant. But at least I can feed the extra to someone.
I have a couple of articles scheduled for Handwoven Magazine for next spring. The deadlines are approaching and I need to finish some more weaving so that I have photos for one article and the project to send for another. This is Clasped Warp, a technique usually done on a rigid heddle loom. I am adapting it to use on a multi-shaft loom.
I have some custom projects in progress on the AVL loom in the shop. I have woven two Year to Remember blankets on this warp. Now I need to finish the warp with other blankets. The yarn above is all naturally dyed and I want to use that for a blanket that I can post on the new Fibershed Market site (not available yet). The yarn is dyed with mushroom (dark gray), hollyhock (blue-green), indigo (blue), weld, (yellow), cosmos (orange), and madder (rose).
Here is how it looks on the loom.
A friend dropped off more plant material to use for ecoprinting scarves and I wanted to get to it right away while the leaves were fresh. I have learned something about working with cannabis leaves–they start to fold up quickly. It’s tedious to arrange them the way I want them to look. They have a property of differential friction–the little hairs on the leaves allow them to slide one way on the fabric, but not the other. There is a second scarf that goes on top of these and it’s important to have the leaves spread out as the second scarf is spread across the first. Each scarf is wet with different solutions and they begin to react quickly upon contact.
I am trying out some square scarves as well. This one is printed with cosmos flowers and leaves.
These scarves use maple and madder leaves (left) and cannabis and indigo leaves (right). I rolled all of these up on PVC pipes and they steamed for 90 minutes. They are cooling in the pot and taturhe unveiling will happen tomorrow.
I should be weaving. I planned to listen to a new book and weave today. This is what I did instead.
Anytime you have a sheep in for medical care it takes a little more time. Hazel spent Thursday night at UCD VMTH (Should I to spell it out? U.C. Davis, Veterinary Medicine Teaching Hospital). I took her in because the night before and Thursday morning she looked like the photo below.
I had texted the veterinarian I usually use and she thought that Hazel should go in. She never acted sick other than not wanting to eat because her mouth was so sore. We still don’t have a diagnosis because we’re waiting on blood tests. No matter which, if any, come back positive, the care would be the same. Isolation and TLC. Hazel is not happy about being locked in. I put a couple of sheep across the aisle from her so that she’s not totally alone. She is getting meloxicam and a slurry of something that includes lidocaine to coat her mouth to reduce the pain so she’ll eat.
After cleaning the barn and dealing with other sheep I faced the two skirting tables holding skulls in various states of cleaning. I am not very good at this but there is a value to the skulls and I need to make it work.
I had planned to boil some of them and see if I could get them cleaner that way. I brought two up to the garage and started a pot.
After I got that started (and started the timer on my phone so I wouldn’t forget) I dumped the wheelbarrow load in the dye garden where I had cut out the old dead hollyhock stalks.
This is a different view of the cosmos that you can see in the photo where the hollyhocks were. I took this after I picked cosmos today…or maybe while I was in the middle of it. It still seems like there are a lot, but not as many as earlier. Notice the sunflower that came up from last year’s seeds. It’s hard to tell in this photo but it is massive. There are two branches at the bottom. One is leaning left and the top is bent over. You can barely make out the head of the sunflower just above where you see the gravel driveway in the photo. The other fell over very early in the season and that is what looks like a big branch coming toward me in the lower half of the photo. If you look to the right of that between the close cosmos and the big stand of cosmos you can pick out smaller sunflower heads. Those are growing off that big branch that goes all the way to the right side of the photo. I took this photo to show the hollyhock that was planted just behind the row of cosmos. It is now flowering but you can only see if if you know where to look right at the base of that leaning sunflower. This was a lot of writing to explain a not very interesting photo. This is one of my dye garden plots.
One of my goals today was to photograph more products for my website and for the website that will be for Fibershed producers nationwide. (!!) I’ve been weighing fresh cosmos as I pick the flowers and after they are dried so I can sell dried flowers with a recommendation of how much you need to dye a give amount of yarn. I have dyed enough yarn with these flowers now to know that you can start with a 1:1 ratio (weight of fresh flowers to yarn) and have plenty of color left in the dye pot for more. I wanted to do another batch after I found my gram scale. I don’t want to try and measure smaller quantities in tenths of ounces. At that 1:1 ratio this should dye 4 ounces of yarn (oops, I just recalculated and it should be 113.4 gm.
I have been keeping a spread sheet and have seen that the weight of dry cosmos is .19 that of fresh cosmos. So here is enough dried flowers to dye 4 ounces of yarn. I need to continue to take photos of the process to add these to the two websites.
I set up two dye pots and turned them on low figuring that I could keep track of those while I took more photos.
In the meantime I got distracted by this interesting leaf! Great weaving pattern and colors!
Moving on to buttons. I need to update what I have on my website and add them to the new website.
The template for the sale products on my website uses horizontal photos. If I use a square photo it is cropped. That is why some of the weaving tools, looms, etc are not the way they should be –I used photos provided by Schacht and Ashford. But the new website, as well as that of the Artery, which I’m helping with, needs square photos. So I am taking two sets of photos or taking the horizontal photos with enough room around them that I can also crop to square. Very annoying. I know I could change the template I use on the Squarespace platform but do I have the energy to figure it out without having to change all the other stuff I have on there? Not right now. Maybe never.
My goal is to get these listed on my website before I send this blog post so that I can include a link, but that may not happen tonight. [I am proof-reading now and know that I won’t get to that. If you’re interested in some check back or see me at Lambtown next month.]
We’re trying to have a consistent background for photos and I’m using this manila paper. (Want to know about Manila paper? Read this blog post.)
More distractions. These sheep were looking through the fence near where I’m taking photos. I really need to figure out the breeding line-up. This is a topic for another post (as are most of the topics in this one). But this introduces one of the contenders for breeding in two weeks. This should be another post because I’ll explain why I don’t have any adult 4-horn rams to use now and have only a couple of choices here and it’s really too early to know for sure. Back to photos.
At the State Fair I had a display of natural dyeing. (See how it looked in this blog post.) It’s time to do something with those yarns. I may weave with some but I wanted photos for yet another blog post and I may try to sell them online. These yarns are the base yarns I used for the display. That is gray Jacob yarn spun spun at Valley Oak Mill, Jacob britch yarn that I don’t have listed on the website, 4 ounce skeins of TR yarn spun at the Mendocino Mill, and 1 ounce skeins of TR yarn spun in Wyoming. I’d better update those listings before I post this. They all went in a variety of natural dyes. I’m only showing a little of that here.
This is the oxalis dye pot. I decided that if I want to sell these as groups it makes more sense to sell the same yarn together instead of the same color. If you try to use all those yarns in one project you’ll have challenges. The britch wool has little elasticity and the Timm Ranch wool has lots. It’s better to use like yarns together and mix up the colors.
So this is the batch of gray yarns that went in all the dye pots. I’ll put these online but it won’t be tonight.
Back to what was going on in the kitchen. This is the previous batch of yarn from dyeing 4 ounces of fresh cosmos flowers–a gray skein and a white skein were the first 4 ounces in the dye pot. I used 4 ounces more the next day. I dyed a two ounce skein after that in the same pot.
This seems like a random change. There are two freezers in the garage and last week we found them leaking. The power strip they were using failed. Needless to say that was a mess and that’s why we cooked a turkey 3 days ago and are still eating it. Fortunately there was a lot of random stuff in the freezers–yarn that had been there for years to kill any potential bugs, parts of butchered sheep that Dan hadn’t figured out how to cook and that had been there a long time, etc. So most was thrown away. I salvaged my pomegranate juice and the turkey which had not completely thawed. Today I cleaned the freezer while keeping an eye on the pot with the skulls. I put some containers of water in there to use for indigo dyeing tomorrow.
At this point, about 12:30, I came to the house for breakfast. I added yarn to those cosmos dyepots and worked on the computer while paying attention to them.
This afternoon I took the skulls out of the pot to see how well they were cleaned. I spent a lot of time picking pieces off. It is interesting to see what a fused horn ram skull is like. You can see the fusing of the outer part of the horn on this side.
There are three horns on this side.
I’ve been reading up on how to do a better job with the skulls. The next step after cleaning off the stuff that isn’t bone is to degrease. This is how I left the skulls–in Dawn liquid.
How much time and energy do you spend making decision? Sometimes it seems overwhelming and it’s often about something trivial.
I’m helping with a new website. I’m not really helping, but being a guinea pig about how it all works for a non-tech person to enter things and helping to find glitches and things that are confusing. Is that a beta-tester? Or do you have to know more to have that title?
There is a place that asks for a banner across the part that will have Meridian Jacobs info. How to decide what photo? Sheep? Weaving? Yarn? The point of the website is to sell things. How do I choose one? The photo needs to fit the banner space. The software will supposedly take the appropriate size piece out of whatever photo you send, but I thought I should start with something the right size. I started with these below. Some were just experimental to see how they would fit the space.
A sheep photo? This is an older photo but I suppose that doesn’t matter as long as the quality of the photo is good enough.
I wanted to try something with more sheep and a background. This is not a good background.
This photo looks a bit washed out–maybe I can adjust that but at this point I was looking for any photo that fit the sheep into the landscape with a bit of horizon.
What about yarn or weaving? I’d sure like to sell blankets. Version 1.
Version 2.
Version 3.
I have a series of these photos that I have always liked.
I have used this photo (full size) a lot because it shows the difference between black and white sheep and lilac sheep. Townes, the lilac on the right, got the tips of the top horns caught in a fence two days ago and I found him dead.
Back to landscape photos. Here is one with a horizon and a lot of sheep and lush grass. The sheep are pregnant and recently shorn.
I walked across the road this morning and had just changed the fences so the sheep have this field near the road. That’s the view I was after. It is a narrow band but it shows sheep and the horizon. I like that this one shows our position in the Sacramento Valley. That notch you see in the hills is where the road goes to Lake Berryessa. Its a landmark for me.
This is a little different cropping of this morning’s photo.
A closer up view makes the sheep and the barn more prominent and removes the white fence on the right but cuts off the trees and my notch on the hills.
Back to yarn. This is what I did the last few days. Indigo on the left and Cosmos and Dahlia on the right.
But maybe I need black and white.
No decision made yet. Any suggestions are welcome…
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