Sheep!

Well, they aren't my sheep, but friends with sheep is about as good as having sheep yourself!

Clun Forest sheep

They are Andrea's sheep, some Clun Forest sheep originally from Leah Wheeler's flock. There are four; a ram, a ewe and a pair of twins. Andrea's friend, John Bohr, came over to give her a sheep shearing lesson. He has a lot of Merino sheep, which are larger, I think. They are supposed to have a finer wool, too.

shearing the sheep

Sheep shearing seems to be something that takes more than one lesson to learn and a lot of practice to learn well. John just barely seemed to nudge the sheep and they'd roll over on their okole ready to be sheared. It's much harder than it looks! He'd then shear their top knot between their eyes, then around the ears, then down one side of the neck. Then turn the head and get the other side of the neck, then down across the shoulder, the belly and then the back. Then the sheep would roll over and the other side would be done. If he hadn't been explaining what he was doing, the whole procedure would have taken about five minutes.

Since neither John nor Andrea wanted to spin the wool, I now have a gloriously large container of raw wool to spin up. To begin with, I'm spinning it "in the grease" with all the lanolin still on it. It is a nice golden tan color when it's spun up, so far there is a skein of chunky and almost a skein of finger weight yarn