Sheep Diversity

Sprouts

By in Children's Wear, Color, Design, Estival cardigan, Knit Local, Merino, Musing, Sheep Diversity No Comments

Some knitting projects volunteer themselves and prove as delightful as flowers you didn’t plant.

The vision of a new design can grow from almost any seed—from the yarn itself, from nature, from history, and sometimes from all of these braided together. In April I found I couldn’t set aside the remnants of a skein of Spincycle Yarn I’d used for a hat for my father; the earthy tones still wanted my attention, and they wanted prominent display on the yoke of a sweater. As it was spring, I had flowers dancing before my eyes, and as I was leafing through a book of Scandinavian mitten designs, I chanced across a thumb motif I thought might be the right scale for a child’s sweater if worked at the larger gauge I was imagining. I fossicked in my stash for likely partners for the Spincycle—namely a main color—and found three plump fingering-weight skeins of Catskill Merino in the springiest watercress green. Another remnant skein of heathered brown Raumagarn was just right for the flowers’ roots (and I loved that the flowers had big strong roots in the original mitten). I knew I hadn’t enough of the Spincycle to carry me through the foliage in the motif, but lo, there was the skein of BFL/silk I’d made in my first year of spinning practice, featuring the same olive and golden greens with burgundy. It could easily pick up where the Spincycle would leave off. I auditioned a whole raft of neutrals for the yoke background and wasn’t satisfied. Everything was the wrong weight or looked too flat or too stark against the lively color play of the handspun contrast colors. But when I popped into Wild Fibers in Mt. Vernon for some buttons, there was an intriguingly flecked pale golden skein of Noro Kumo that leapt out at me. Everything was coming together.

I’ll have to steal it back to block the button band!

In the middle of my merry progress, I learned that Catskill Merino had lost Eugene Wyatt, its founding shepherd. I wrote on Instagram, “Once in awhile in life you brush against someone with a truly original spark and it kindles something in you that burns for a long time, perhaps unnoticed. Eugene was one of those—and a good writer to boot. That I’m a shepherd now is, perhaps, a little bit due to him.” Eugene certainly expanded my sense of what kind of person might choose to devote himself to sheepkeeping. He kept one of the best blogs on shepherding, equal parts poetic and practical. He punctuated his market days selling wool and lamb at Union Square with jaunts to the cinema; he read a lot of Proust. Even in a brief conversation you could sense the depth of the living and thinking he’d done.

I think about Eugene Wyatt whenever people are surprised that we’ve shelved our city life in favor of a sheep farm on a tiny island. I think about the assumptions I once made that farmers were mostly folks who’d inherited a way of life and hadn’t escaped to anything more intellectual. Eugene made me consider that you could be a passionate intellectual and a farmer all in one. And now I know from experience that learning how to farm uses every intellectual skill you’ve got—and then some. Writing about it as well as Eugene did clarifies your purposes and precipitates beauty out of the daily soup of humble chores like mowing, moving fences, scrubbing water troughs, trimming hooves, mucking sheep sheds, battling weeds, and making up fecal slurries to count worm eggs.

Eugene and Dominique, who dyes the yarn and helps with the flock and now carries the work forward alone, were also at the beginning of my awakening to the farm-to-skein story of the wool I choose to work with. Most knitting shops weren’t carrying yarns like theirs when I took up the craft, and it was fresh and marvelous to sink my fingers into wool raised just a few hours away and dyed with botanical extracts. Since I first discovered Catskill Merino, the market for locally grown wool has really begun to flower, and that’s wonderful to see. I’ve had the chance to knit with many more single-flock yarns over the years, and I’ve loved most of them. The beautiful green skeins in Ada’s new sweater only rekindled my appreciation for the quality of breeding and craft at Catskill Merino: this is really excellent wool, terrifically soft without sacrificing character. It’s still head of the class even now that the class is larger.

The true testament? My kid didn’t take this sweater off all day when I gave it to her, even as the mercury climbed to eighty.

Someone’s going to ask when the pattern will be available. I’m going to revise the motif a little bit—maybe take out some of those three-color rows with long floats—and grade it up to adult sizes. I might make a pullover for myself. I may chart a shorter version of the flower so the yoke depth can be shallower, allowing for smaller kid sizes. I’ve got another design project on my needles right now, but I’m looking forward to picking this up in September.

Fiber flock

By in Crossbreds, Lambs, Oak Knoll Farm, OKF Flock, Sheep Diversity No Comments

We’re starting the new year with some very exciting (to me) additions to Oak Knoll Farm: wool sheep! If your knowledge of sheep is pretty general purpose, you’re probably not aware of the remarkable range of wool these critters can grow. But think about the variety of dog hair from poodle curls to husky fluff and you’ll begin to get the gist. Our North Country Cheviots grow a solid middle-of-the-road fleece, softer than people expect but more durable than famous breeds like Merinos, medium in length, unglossy and pure white when it’s clean. This wool takes color very well and can make a lovely sweater yarn. It’s largely overlooked by North Country breeders in the USA, who are more interested in the rapid growth, muscular body type, hardihood, and independent nature of these sheep. I’m keenly interested in producing and knitting yarn made of nothing but North Country wool.

Back in November I attended Deb Robson’s spinning retreat here on the island, and the focus this time was on crossbred fleeces. Sheep of mixed parentage can grow utterly gorgeous wool that blend the qualities of their purebred ancestors in unique and intriguing ways. They can also grow crap wool that’s the worst of everything, but therein lies the allure of trying to hone a particular type of fleece in a whole flock over many generations. You can get gold or garbage or anything in between. One woman who really did succeed at crossbreeding a handspinning flock with distinctive characteristics was Sally Bill on neighboring Lopez Island. The Sally Bill Specials are few in number now, but we got to sample a little of their wool at Deb’s retreat. (I think we all fell a little in love with a ewe called Mumsy.) Deb had more wool from Lopez sheep, too, and the fleece that immediately piqued my interest was a Blue-Faced Leicester x North Country/Coopworth cross. I could feel the North Country in it immediately, but the Coopworth and BFL made it sing a new song. I had to find out where it had come from, and I had to start thinking seriously about running a little crossbred flock of my own to see what I might achieve by way of variation on a North Country theme.

My Lopez contacts confirmed my hunch that the fleece was from Lucky Ewe farm. And it just so happened that friends of ours were already arranging to buy some ewe lambs from Lucky Ewe to cross with their Romney ram. I decided we’d better tag along. So we all dropped our kids at school and hopped the interisland ferry with the trailer in tow. Grown-up field trip! A long meander through the wooded country lanes of Lopez brought us to the field where the ewe lambs were waiting for us. Our friends picked out their five and then we loaded up half a dozen more to form the foundation of the Oak Knoll Fiber Flock.

They’re all from a BFL ram, and their mothers are a mix of Romney, Coopworth, East Friesian, and yes, North Country Cheviot. I’ve been in touch with the shepherd who tended the Lucky Ewe flock in its previous incarnation and he confirmed that he did indeed bring over rams from Oak Knoll Farm. We have two sets of twin sisters amongst our six, and from sheep to sheep there’s a lot of variety in their characteristics. Some look more like Romneys, some like BFLs, some like neither. One has suggestions of North Country in her Roman nose and clean, strong head — not to mention her tendency to watch our every move and dash for freedom if we approach — but her fleece is nearly black. All these girls have long, crimpy locks. It’s a treat to bury your hands in their wool.

I’ve named them after great queens of history. Eleanor is their leader, the only one bold and calm enough to approach us and nibble offerings from the children’s hands. Her sister Cleopatra is dubbed Patch for the white spot on her nose. Victoria is the short white one with North Country ears, and Maud has the noble BFL profile and wild eyes. Theodora is Vicky’s brown sister with splotches of white on one cheek. Zenobia is the dark chocolate girl I can’t wait to shear.

They’re separated from the North Countries while they acclimate to their new home, so I built them a covered hay feeder. It’s small and lightweight so that Adam and I can easily carry it about for mobstocking, but I’m proud to report it withstood yesterday’s gale without damage. The little queens seem to think it’s just right, too.

So here they are, back at the farm where their great-grandfather, perhaps, was born. My plans for them are wide open — half to our friend’s Romney and half to a North Country ram with a good fleece, perhaps? I’d like to add more Coopworth somewhere down the road if I could find a ram nearby. For now we’ll take it slow, get to know them, and eagerly await their first clip in March!

Winter Isle

By in Keep Your Hands Warm, Sheep Diversity, Shetland, Traveling, Winter Isle mitts 1 Comment

I’ve been busy! The Madrona Retreat is the best kind of busy for knitters: all that learning, connecting, experimenting, making… maybe a little drinking later in the evening… It’s enough stimulation to tide a girl over for quite some time! This year was different for me. My Madrona mate of nearly a decade had her hands full managing the first inaugural Brooklyn Tweed booth in the marketplace, so I stayed on my own in an Airbnb room rather than at the hotel. I signed up for just one class (Amy Herzog’s Advanced Sweater Modifications; can’t tell you how excited I am to draft my own set-in sleeves!) to keep my experience more mellow, and that left me with buckets of free time. Luckily, there are always friends to meet at Madrona. Kathy was down for Thursday night and Friday—I can’t believe it was only last year at Madrona that we met for the first time. I chatted with llama farmers and sheep keepers and dyers and spinners and (obviously) knitters, many of whom attend this event year after year. It’s the first time Abundant Earth Fiber Mill has had a booth, though, and I’d cooked up something special for the occasion.

Lydia spun a light fingering-weight yarn from the natural colors of Shetland fleece grown on three local farms. It’s a worsted three-ply and very strong despite its dainty appearance. That yarn said MITTS to me, so I made a pattern and Lydia made adorable wee kits. I used part of a Scandinavian pine bough motif, which you’ll often see radiating out from a large floral center to fill the corners in Selbu mitten designs, and paired it with some wild waves from Shetland. Behold the Winter Isle mitts:

Martha was a sport and modeled them so you can see how they look on human hands. The pattern goes all the way around, which means there’s no designated right and left mitt, although the charts are mirrored. You can see that the length is a little longer than many fingerless mitts; I like enough coverage that I can curl my fingers down inside if I’m out for a walk, so that’s how I design ’em. They’ve got a thumb gusset for mobility and comfort (the only way I roll) and a cuff in half-twisted rib. The corrugated rib at the finger edge uses both contrast colors, and the detail of the two-color bind-off never ceases to charm me.

Want a pair of your own? The kits were a one-time special for the Madrona market (unless Lydia decides to make more), but you can substitute any fingering-weight wool and grab the pattern from my Ravelry store (link in the sidebar). You’ll need 110 yards of the main color and just a few yards of each of the contrasts. I hope you like them! I may have to make another pair to keep for myself now, because I’m hearing that winter isn’t done with the PNW quite yet. Snow again this week? Truly? Okay!

1 2 3