Some of Where the Heck I’ve been

Only the most utterly recent bit, actually, but the pictures are cute.

Meet Louie:

He’s about 8 weeks old. Don’t know what happened to his mother, he was found in Windsor, desperately and unmistakably looking for someone to take care of him. He was dehydrated and starving when we took him in, but he’s recovered now, growing lots of long grey guard hairs, and there’s no reason he can’t be released to live a happy, normal squirrely life once he’s old enough.

Except for the part where his best friend is a cat, yes.  Right now they are rolling around together on the floor – Velcro outside Louie’s cage and Louie inside, but still – nose to nose and paw to paw.  And just my luck, the camera is down on the front porch.  But, Velcro looked after the bunnies too, and that didn’t seem to do anybody any harm.  I’m sure it’ll be fine.  Anyway, it’s the chickens he’ll need to watch out for!

Speaking of chickens, we had seven hatch on Mother’s Day.  MommaHen is doing a great job, although I think she’ll be cutting out as soon as they’re old enough, rather than hanging around as some do, just so she can get some sleep!

I love that picture.  I think it should inspire a movie about the Chickie Gang.  I’m thinking something like The Dubliners, only with five yellow chicks, one black chick and an egg.

I did rip back the sweater, BTW.  You’re a tough crowd.  It’s knitted back a bit past where I was when I frogged it, seems to be going ok.  It’s going slow, but so is everything else I’m working on.  It is spring.  You may recall from last year that “spring” does not involve a lot of sitting on the deck sipping lemonade.  We’re even building fences again; we have some new pasture for the woolly darlings.

And here’s the sweater that I’ve been meaning to show you since last time:

I love this sweater.  It is Ysolda Teague’s Vivian.  It may or may not be the best sweater in the world, but it is by far the best sweater in my closet.  The shaping is flattering without being too extreme, the cables are great, the fit on the sleeves is great, I love this sweater.  I may actually knit it again so I can have two, is that weird?  With so much knitting to be done in the world… ok, maybe, maybe not.  But I still totally recommend this pattern.  If you’re on Ravelry, you can look it up and you will see that it continues to be flattering on a wide range of figures, too.

 

It’s not exactly denial

So I am knitting this sweater:

And leaving aside the really embarassing amount of time I have spent worrying about whether it has “too much colour” for me to wear, it is going pretty well, and I am happy with it.

Except, I am knitting it one size too large. I thought I might be knitting it one size too large, and now that I am well into shaping the waist (it has shaping, or this probably wouldn’t matter at all) it is very very clear that I was right. It is a bit big. It still doesn’t really look big to me, but careful and repeated cross checking of all the measurements involved shows that look big or not, there is “a bit of ease” and then there is “too darned big”.

Where the part that is like denial comes in is not my inability to see the actual size of the sweater, but my total obliviousness to what I actually am shaped like. I know what my measurements are – I make clothes for myself, I take my measurements regularly. I just don’t seem to be able to translate those numbers into an even slightly accurate notion of how much space I take up in the world. My vision of myself seems to be a sort of an amorphous blob that, like a hamster, can squish itself through and into relatively small spaces, but sort of bubbles out again on the other side. I’m not sure that I have any clear idea of the boundary between “myself” and “other stuff”. (Come to think of it, this may explain why I bump into things so often!)

Hang on – let me take stock of my self-image a moment. I am kind of short, I have big eyes, an indistinct hamster-y sort of body, and a tendency to overcommit myself. Holy mother of purl, I think I am a shmoo!

Anyway. The appropriate thing to do at this point (about the sweater, I mean) would be to say some bad words, frog it and start knitting the right size. I don’t want to do that, but I know it is the right thing to do.

Problem is, I am not following a pattern, I am writing one. And it’s going really well: I like the proportions, the math is checking out, I’m happier with it so far than anything I’ve yet knitted “all by myself” as it were. I’m afraid if I go back to square one at this point, I will jinx it. So what I would prefer is to keep going, finish the sweater in this size, make sure it all works, and then worry about the math adjustments for other sizes, which I was going to have to do anyway.

And regardless of whether it fits me or not, the size I am knitting is pretty well in the middle range of “the sizes people tend to be”, so it seems like working out the shaping in that size is a good idea, it will be much easier to make accurate adjustments up and down from the middle than trying to make a big shapely sweater fit little people, or a sweater made for the broomstick folk fit nicely on the curvy types. So it ALSO seems like the reasonable thing to do is to keep going.

And yet. The longer I keep going, the less likely it is that I am ever going to knit this thing in my size, at least in the forseeable future.

Do I finish it, only to rip it back? Do I rip it back now, and risk screwing up my pattern? Do I finish it, grab my lantern and go wandering the earth searching for someone one size larger than I am who might like this sweater? Is there a chance that I would knit the sweater again in my size if I used different yarn the second time?

Maybe I could just eat a lot of pasta?

 

Vanishing Cows

Ok, let’s lighten things up a bit here.  The sheep are still all ok, Momma Hen is seriously considering moving out of the house and resuming normal life as a Hen, the weather is warming up, and Vellum has discovered a few shoots of green stuff that actually seem to be attached to the ground somehow! They’re really tasty – he keeps getting this goofy, dreamy look on his face as if to say “Wow, can you imagine if this stuff was everywhere? That would be sooo cool… I could just walk around and eat whenever I wanted!”

In short, although I don’t want to speak too quickly, I think we are getting on top of this “March” thing.  Speaking of which, I fixed my calendar:

So.  The other night, (I don’t know what night, it’s all a blur – maybe a week ago Sunday?) at about 2:30 AM, Raven, who keeps later hours than I do, was going to the bathroom before bed.  Our bathroom window faces the driveway on the side of the house.  Glancing out the window he saw, in the bright moonlight, a large animal walking up the drive towards the yard.

His confused thoughts were, quickly: a)The sheep are out; b) Why would the sheep be heading back into the yard; c) That is not a sheep; d) That is a cow.  Just as he was getting to “There is a cow in the driveway”, a rather large bull came trotting along, following the cow.

Raven ran up the stairs to wake me, and I who for some not very good reason wasn’t asleep yet quickly threw on a sweater and ran outside with him to (I don’t actually know what) do something about the cows.

There were no cows.

Now, our property isn’t that big, and cattle – well – are.  It took me maybe three minutes to get down the stairs and outside, and it did not seem reasonable to either of us that in that time two cows had simply vanished.  But there continued to be no cows.  We checked in the yard.  We looked up and down the road, we scanned the surrounding fields.  (Not a lot of trees around here, and did I mention the moonlight?)

The cows continued to not be there.

At this point I might have begun to question Raven’s arguably questionable sanity, except that in the light of the flashlight I found:

cow tracks.  Very large, very fresh, very clear in my muddy spring driveway, cow tracks.  They came up the drive, they appeared (although it was dark and quite muddy) to go down the drive… and they vanished.  Rather like the cows.

Eventually, we got to sleep.  The next morning in sunlight, I could see with utter clarity that two cows had come along the (dirt) road past my mailbox, turned up the drive, grabbed some hay from the bale at the back of said drive, turned around, proceeded back to the road… and vanished.

Later that morning, a pickup came by.  They were moving very slowly, clearly looking for something.  “Have you, um, lost some cows?”  I asked.  “Why yes we have!”  So I told them what little I knew of their cows moonlight adventures.  They examined the tracks.  The one fellow in the truck was along specifically because he is a good tracker.  He agreed, unfortunately, with what I had already determined – the tracks stopped at the foot of our drive.

All day they looked for their cows.  More and more people got involved.  Every now and then a car would speed past, presumably following some lead, and then slowly crawl back, passengers hopelessly scanning fields they had already searched and searched again, when the lead turned out to be a bust.

Finally, as the sun was setting, we saw a strange parade coming up the road:  The cow and bull, ambling happily along the side of the road followed by a number of (very tired looking) guys on foot, three cars a minivan and a 4-wheeler.  Raven tried to take a picture, but he was hurrying and the light was awful:

I wouldn’t believe me either, but some desperate photoshopping on the above, and look:

Cows.

The tracker had eventually managed to pick up a sign of them considerably further down the road.  They had left the road, walked up the treeline for a couple of fields, had themselves a little party by a creek, followed the creek halfway down to the lake, and were circling back along the edge of another field by the time he caught up to them.  Must have been ten, fifteen miles of tracking cows through mud.  Good times.

 

Under my rock

That’s it.  As of now, I am banishing March.  Who needs a month named afther a none-too-stable god of war anyway?  Next year I’m skipping it entirely.  Or maybe, because my brother and his daughter both have birthdays in this otherwise stupid and vindictive month, I shall re-name it.  Perhaps I could call the empty space between February and April after Persephone, that would be nice.  Either that, or after one of those Medieval Saints who were out hunting and found a stag with a glowing cross and became lifelong vegetarians, someone like that.

Honestly, I thought the Vanishing Cow Episode was an attempt on the part of the Universe to lighten the mood a little.  (It was funny – I’ll tell you later.  I don’t feel funny right now.)  Sadly, all it was was setting us up for the one-two punch.  And like suckers, we fell for it.

Thank you, by the way, for all your comments and emails, they were really really sweet and I appreciate your thoughts and support.  I have been trying to respond to everybody, but if you haven’t had an email from me please forgive, I’m kind of losing it right now.

Galahad is dead.  Tuesday morning he was fine, by Tuesday evening he just seemed a bit funny, and by Wednesday afternoon he was dead.  That is the short version.  The long version involves a whole lot more frantically attempting to save him, plus a vet who never has shown up.  Or called.  (Not Bryan’s vet.  He is wonderful.) And a couple of nervous breakdowns, and you know.  Crap.

What we think (are increasingly sure the longer everyone else stays healthy) is that he was poisoned.  Not intentionally poisoned by some asshole, I hasten to add.  If that was the case I would be hiding in the bushes with a beartrap and some arrows, or something.  Poisoned ones.  No, I mean that the only thing that changed from Tuesday morning to Wednesday afternoon is that Tuesday I opened a new package of his milk replacer stuff, prior to which we’d been using stock left over from lambing last winter.  I do not know whether he was maybe allergic to something in the new stuff, if it was different somehow, or if there is actually something wrong with the milk.  I can probably call the government and arrange to get it tested, and I think I’d better, just in case.

He had no symptoms of illness.  He was eating until late Wednesday morning, his pooper was working fine, his urine was clear (TMI, sorry) there was no fever, no congestion, his pulse was ok.  He was alert, his eyes and skin were clear.  Unfortunately, his body seemed to be shutting down, bit by bit.

You know how bad this month is being?  Here’s how bad this month is being: The GOOD news right now is that Blackie had a miscarriage.  That is good news because we didn’t actually think she was pregnant and she really oughtn’t to have been, and she’s ok and will be much healthier for not being pregnant.  Still, for that to be the good news I feel that I am not in my happy place.

I’m going back under my rock for a bit now.  Or maybe I’ll just go hide out in the barn and cry.  I can hug sheep that way, and the hens will come and visit.  They love to climb in the hay.  When I come out again, I will tell you the Vanishing Cow story.  Also there has been intense knitting happening, because that is a good thing to do when you’re stressed and under a rock.

 

The Best Little Puppy In The World

Some of you have already heard that we had to put Bryan to sleep on Friday.  We had been hoping not to have to bring him to the vet, but he was failing a little bit each day, and Wednesday night he had what was probably a small stroke.  After that, he couldn’t really walk at all, and he was very confused.  He still recognized Raven and I, which was a mercy to us, but he didn’t seem to know where he was or what was going on.

That would have been hard on Bry, as he wouldn’t have been sure what the rules were, and he needed to follow the rules.  If there weren’t enough, he would make some up himself.

Wednesday and Thursday evenings we talked to and about Bryan, and cried and remembered.  When he was a puppy, he had a rock collection.  Every now and then he would bring a stone into the house and show it to us.  We put them on a little shelf by the back door, and when he came in or out he would always check the shelf to make sure his rocks were still there.

He traveled all over Ontario with us to SCA events, and always kept our campsites raccoon free.  He never needed a fence – when other dogs came to visit and they were playing he would always stop and bark if the other dog crossed the property line as if to say “what are you doing, you can’t go over there!?”  When Raven was working in Windsor for a year and I was in London, Bryan was one of the two people I consider responsible for keepiing me sane and getting out of myself when needed.  (Emily is the other one.)

It was scary when we got Bryan, because at the time it was the biggest responsibility we had ever taken on.  Getting a dog (or any animal) is like having a child, it is a commitment to take care of them for their life, to put them first, because unlike a child they will never develop enough responsibility to feed themselves, to grow away from you.  Animals grow towards you instead, they will always need you more.  But I am so glad that Bryan came to live with us and my only regret ever is that he couldn’t be with us forever.

He was sixteen years old.  We’re going to bury him here under the oak trees.

Goodbye, Stinky Puppy.  Thank you.

 

You guys rock!

2009 co-op shares are sold out already!  How excited am I?!

I am right now carding wool (from sheep who think oats and straw are some kind of ritual adornment)  so I’ll be back later with more news.

(and if you haven’t actually physically purchased your share through Etsy but you talked to me about it, yeah, I’m counting you in.  It’s ok.)

I’m feeling very bouncy about this.  I’m going to go hug a sheep.

 

Big Guy

Look at this (terrible picture I took with my phone ‘cos it’s all I had on me):

What that is, that is a llama eating hay at the trough with the sheep! While I am far enough away to take this picture!

He seems to be being accepted as a sort of honorary sheep.  We, the stupid humans, keep telling them that he’s a LAMB-a, but that’s ridiculous.  It’s obvious that he is not a sheep; they think maybe he’s a goat.  Blackie, who knows goats, says he isn’t, but she hasn’t been able to come up with a more plausible suggestion.  They would ask, but nobody has a clue what he’s saying.

Galahad, meanwhile, thinks the sheep are pretty cool, if bossy, and he likes to hang around with them (preferably just out of Freyja’s reach) and copy them – hence the eating hay pictured above.  Blackie, no real surprise by now, is the most friendly with him.  She’s never butted him, and she lets him tag around after her, with occasional glances at the house as if to say “does anybody know what this kid is talking about?”

 

Old School Fibre Farm

If you’ve been reading this blog for that long, which probably you haven’t, you may remember waaaaay back at the beginning when I got hooked on spinning, and I said I was thinking of hanging out in Downtown Buxton (‘downtown Buxton’, hee-hee, that would mean ‘at the barber shop’) with a sign around my neck reading “will work for wool”?

Yeah, well that actually turned out pretty well for me, in fact.  And then I got these sheep.  These darling, personality-packed oh-how-I-love-them sheep. Dating from about a week before the sheep actually moved in, Raven and I had started talking about the concept of a Fibre Co-Op.  He’d been hearing/reading about some co-operative crop farms, and things were working pretty well for the people involved in those ventures – so well that one of them was planning to expand into livestock in the following year.  (The popular term I believe is CSA – Community Supported Agriculture.  I’m ignoring that for the moment, but you can call it whatever makes you happy.

We couldn’t see any particular reason why the same idea wouldn’t work for fibre, and so we both got kind of set on the idea.  Then Jodi found and sent me a link to the  Martha’s Vineyard site,  which basically just proved that the time was right for this sort of thing and  other people were having the same idea.

So we spent a year and a bit learning about being shepherds, we got a new ram and some more pasture, we got a llama.  And we still want to do this thing.  So we’re doing it.  (Really, we’re actually doing it!  We have members already!  Welcome, people!)  There are still shares available through that etsy link up on the right.  I am not posting all the shares at once, because I don’t know whether there will be more interest in roving or in yarn, so if you try to buy in and they’re sold out, just email me or comment and I’ll let you know what the actual status is.

Since this is the first year, we have dramatically limited the shares.  At the moment I am processing all the wool myself  – this will probably change in the future, but only if I can find a trustworthy, preferably small-scale and local milling operation.  I am already looking at options, but dudes, there is a rant coming.  Anyway.  In order that everybody get a nice big share of the wooly harvest, and in a timely manner, and in order that we can together improve and hopefully expand the operation, we’re starting small.

I’ve set it up so you can purchase either a yarn share or a roving share (or both, who am I to judge?).  Each annual share equals about five pounds of wool through the year.  There are three farms providing wool, so you will get some Blackface, some Rambouillet, some Lincoln and some Llama – although the llama will be just a taste, ‘cos he’s not so big yet and there’s only one of him.  But dudes, Virgin Llama – it’s like a first-year bonus package!  Some of the wool will be 100% insert-sheep-here, some blended, so you can have a nice sampling of what these wools are like and what you can do with them.

I was stymied for a while trying to figure out what to do about colours – didn’t seem fair for me to pick, and anyway lots of people may want to dye their own – but offering all the bazillion options for weights and colors and not was just going to turn into a paperwork nightmare.  Then I found Willow Tree Farms, and they are using the smack-yourself-in-the-forehead-it’s-so-obvious solution: before each shipment goes out, everybody gets a colour sheet and they can pick what they like best from a selection of dyed or hand painted (or natural).  That way you know and have some more control over what you get.  And over time the available colourways will grow, as we get struck by inspiration/aspiration.

As far as member participation goes – your money will be used to sustain and improve the flock (i.e. breeding for more yummy wool) and generally allow them to live their happy sheepy lives in whatever way makes them comfortable.  In return, you get a bunch of wool.  But it doesn’t have to stop there – your comments and questions are welcome and your ideas will be given serious consideration.  And of course, if you’re in the area, stop by and have a visit.  We won’t make you shovel poop, and you can take Blackie for a walk.  She loves that.

 

Back before the Llama, I promised yarn.  This is what I did with one of those crazy coloured batts:

I spun it (obviously) and then I’d been going to ply it with something dark, á la that purple and blue stuff Emily gave me ages ago, but then I remembered I had quite a lot of blackface dyed with some red wine that had gone off.  It came out a strange sort of not-quite-pink, not-quite-gray neutral, and was oddly soothing to me.  So I plyed it with that instead, and I quite like it!  I also love the texture difference between the rambouillet and blackface singles.  Blackface is a fuzzier, bouncier wool, and in contrast with the smooth-but dull R, it looks so earthy!

I’m going to wind up with around 500 m DK weight when the other batt is finished, and I’m leaning towards playing around some more with shadow knitting.

I’ve also been carding and dying.  In addition to a llama, I have also picked up more wool.  I now have an embarrassment of  Lincoln longwool.  Shiny!  (Yes, that is a Firefly reference because I am a big nerd, but also it is accurate – the wool is shiny.)

This particular lump of wool (she says, determinedly doing a really crappy sell-job) is up in my…. da da da! Etsy store.  (link on upper right)  Yep, finally set it up.  Not that there is much in it at the moment, but there it is.

Aargh!  Ok.  In relation to the Etsy store, I just typed in a big intro to the fact that I am starting a fibre co-op, as I have wanted to do since the sheep first moved in.  And then my finger did something weird and it all went away.

I’m going to have more (clearly needed) coffee now, and then I will come back later and do a post all about the co-op (or CSA if you prefer), which should probably have it’s own post anyway, for reference.  Yes.  That is better.  I meant to do that.

 

Llama Q&A

Ok, not really a lot of “A” but some.

Yes, Llamas make good guard animals.  The three options we had for a guard were a donkey, a llama or a dog.  Donkeys got crossed off the list right away because Raven and I are both deathly allergic to horses.  A dog was top of the list because Raven kept insisting I was mad to get a llama, and a barking dog is good security across the board.  But we already have the freest of free-range chickens, and this spring Raven plans to get ducks, so we were going to have to be incredibly picky about breed and spend a lot of time training a dog not to chase the birds.  So the llama was looking better, and Raven caved.

Llamas don’t like canines.  They are a prey animal, but because of their size they are a prey animal with ‘teeth’ – if a dog or coyote comes around they sound an alarm, and will even attack it.  The woman I got Galahad from had recently had to rescue her neighbor’s dog who had broken into her llama and alpaca pasture.  The llamas had circled the dog, and were preparing to beat it to death with their dainty wee hoofies.  (Donkeys are the same way, they’ll kick a dog.)

So yes, llamas are guards, and no, my yard/pasture are no longer a good place to be a puppy.  They can learn to get along with dogs they live with, but Bryan, my 16-year old lab, is failing badly.  He is already afraid of sheep and chickens, and only goes out in the front of the house (when he actually bothers to get up), so he doesn’t even know there is a llama.  Bryan is a wonderful dog, we were incredibly lucky to have him, and his failing condition is another part of the reason we don’t want to start with another dog right now.

Another perk with llamas for me is of course that they have fleece.  Galahad is all soft and cushy, and all of his colour is in his guard hair, the undercoat is white like the snow.  His guard hair is pretty soft too, and it may or may not stay that way.  A lot of llamas in North America have been bred for softer hair because of crazy fibre junkies like you and I, but since Galahad is only a baby his hair may thicken up, I really don’t know.  Looks like his ‘virgin’  fleece is going to be a dandy, though!

And no, the postman hasn’t met him yet.  He (Galahad, not the postman) has his own stall in the sheep barn, so that he has a safe place where the sheep won’t beat him up.  We bring him out several times a day, since we’re having a warm spell right now, to let him run around and get used to the yard and the sheep, and the sheep push him around, and when he or we get sick of it he goes back to his stall.  He likes the sheep, he really wants to hang out with them, they just all have to get their highrarchy sorted out.  That took maybe two weeks when Vellum came in and now they’re fine – probably take a bit longer with Galahad because of the stall and the supervised play, but he’s several months younger than Vellum and has no mommy to hide behind when things get rough, so I’m not ready to just throw them all in together and walk away!

Llamas are very trainable, Galahad is already fine with putting on a halter, and we started working on “stand still” this morning. (That will be needed for combing and shearing later).  I also have to work on his allowing me to touch areas he doesn’t like, such as his legs and feet, so that I will be able to trim his hooves when needed.  He loves neck rubs, so I have a starting point for that.

There is lots and lots of llama info online, so if you want any more detail, it is out there.  I’m still researching too, mostly now things that I can train Galahad to do that he might enjoy.  I don’t particularly need a ‘trick llama’, but they are very intelligent, and because he’s bottle-fed and basically sees me as ‘mommy’ (I know, that was fast, huh?) I want to make a lot of my time with him ‘teaching time’ so when he gets older he doesn’t mistake me for having a place in the flock somewhere.  That is when they will spit and kick, it’s a pecking order thing.