Who Said Farmers are less busy in the winter?

All is well with the sheep.  The lambs are nestled into their own space in the pole barn. Our old girls have a separate space from the larger group that we hope will have lambs come March and April.  The snow is beautiful, though rain and ice in the dooryard was not so welcome yesterday.  Spent the past two days dyeing yarn and working in the Tesseract with Meredith, who turned out 4 beautiful batts to spin, Cheryl who is an expert with color selection, and Denise, who has adopted Anita and comes twice a month to help with whatever needs to be done.

This Sunday is Simple Shrug Sunday, that promises that 15 people will go home with a good start on a shrug using farm yarn from the store, hence a reason to round out the yarn color wheel in the store.

 It all began when a year ago at our Yarn and Yoga retreat I was wearing one of mine (I have made 3), done in purple bulky wool and lavendar and purple angora.  It was a chilly weekend, but with the wood stove going I slipped it off and set it down on a chair.  Someone picked it up, and said, may I try this on?  It looked great on her slender body. She wore it for a while when another asked to give it a try.  It looked wonderful on her robust body...and so it traveled from person to person until I decided to write up the pattern. Soon enough people were wanting the pattern, so I wrote it up.  It is really pretty organic....use a variety of yarn including very some bulky wool, soft angora blend, alpaca, or mohair, big needles, knits up quickly....

Here is a display of farm yarn that was already here...noticed not much purple, very little blue, and no greens.


 








A nice collection of seafoam, turquoise, and blue spruce...

Into the dye pot a variety of 100% wool both white and gray to create more choices.





Tomorrow we will see what diversity we can create when 15 women gather to each create their own.

Specialty yarns like mohair blend, boucle, 100% alpaca, and some blues and greens to dye for....