Spinning A Yarn

In an attempt to justify the existence of our one and only sheep, I am finally getting around to using the wool that we worked so hard to sheer off of her last spring. The wool had been washed twice and allowed to dry on a sunny porch, but after that it sat in a clean pig feed bag all fall. I had been talking with my parents during the course of the summer and fall about borrowing the spinning wheel that they have had (and never used) to attempt to spin yarn from wool. My husband had been adding his healthy dose of skeptism to the idea, but finally I prevailed when this last week my parents brought down my great grandmother's spinning wheel.

It is my dad's one and only heirloom piece of furniture from his grandmother, so he made it very clear that this thing is only on loan for a while. This is probably a good thing because I am already very nervous having a 110 year old piece of furniture in a house with five kids running laps through the kitchen. Last know wool spun on this wheel was somewhere around 1900.

I have seen this spinning wheel many times before, but I have not actually seen one work since I was in second grade when there were some women that came to the school and demonstrated how things were done in the "olden days". They showed us spinning wool and making candles, and one other thing that escapes my somewhat porous memory. Needless to say, despite remembering the demonstration of spinning, I don't remember doing it. Thankfully, somewhere in the piles of books that I have inherited from my grandmother, there was a spinning and dyeing book.

I tend to be very much a "learn by doing" kind of a person. It takes a lot of patience to actually stop and read an instruction manual. I flipped open the book and glanced at the pictures and read a few captions. Good enough....now let's do it!

But here is the thing about spinning wheels.....they are not intuitive. They are simple in design and the concept is fairly straight forward - I pull and the spinning wheel spins the fibers thus making yarn. This is much easier said than done.

This particular spinning wheel is a Saxony wheel which is one that you treadle the foot pedal to keep the bobbin and the fly wheel spinning while simultaneously using both your hands to stretch and feed in the fibers that are being spun. There are a few too many sides of the brain required to accomplish all those above listed tasks - seriously, this made rubbing my tummy and patting my head very simple.

The first night I carded some of the wool which, as it turns out, also takes some getting used to. I have a lovely set of scratches on my arm from one of the carding combs to prove this point. I then sat down at approximately 9 pm to start figuring out how the spinning wheel really works.

This particular spinning wheel felt like and old friend. When I was a kid I used to play with it up in my parent's bedroom where they kept it. I would sit and marvel at it as I worked the foot pedal and made the wheel go around and around as fast as I could. I never could quite figure out how it actually spun anything. So, starting late in the evening with a cup of coffee at my side, I sat and fiddled with it, looked at the book and then fiddled some more.

I started with only one string on the wheel and couldn't figure out how the bobbin and the fly wheel were supposed to go different speeds until it dawned on me that maybe there needs to be two strings on the wheel. Looked at the book.....yep, they all have two strings....okay, time to find and tie another string onto the pulley that runs the fly wheel. Voila! By this point it was 11:30 pm.

Now the book says to start with 18 inches of spun yarn. How exactly is that supposed to happen when you don't have a way to spin it? Spinning yarn by hand is brutal, and 18 inches of it would have taken me until 3 am. Of course what I didn't realize at the time was that it doesn't have to be perfect to start out. A foot of crappy hand spun yarn would have probably worked. I resorted to regular yarn that I have lying around and figured that I could tie into that after I got it going. Once I hooked up the regular yarn to the bobbin and started spinning, it went like a breeze....until I added in the carded wool and then it would promptly gum up and derail the entire operation by breaking whatever thread I had on the bobbin. It was now 1 am.

Why so late? I have no idea what kept me up and going. I had been struggling all day at work to keep my eyes open and my head above water, but when I sat down with that wheel I felt happy and content. I honestly think I could have probably worked with it all night. I didn't feel rushed to get it going or figure it out and I was very content to have to restart again and again. I simply loved the rhythm of the thing, the gentle "whirring" of the wheel once I got it going, and the lanolin that started to build up on my fingers from messing with the wool. I pictured my grandma and her mom before her sitting with this same wheel and it made me feel connected to them. Crazy as it may seem, I felt like they were there with me. Chuckling at my fumbling fingers and encouraging me to try it just once more as my grandma had done so many times before with other craft projects that she had taught me. She was the epitome of patience and skill with doing things by hand. It was only because I knew the morning would come quickly and I had plans to take the kiddos sledding that finally convinced me to turn in. Total accumulated spun yarn - zip! New found appreciation for all my ancestors - huge!

Since Tuesday night I have worked with it more and steadily climbed the steep learning curve. By Wednesday night I had a small ball of crudely spun wool with multiple breaks and varying degrees of thickness. By Thursday night I had more yarn spun, slightly thinner and more even in the thickness of the strand. I am hoping that maybe by the end of the weekend I will have the rest of the wool carded and spun with some degree of competency and then I can embark on the dyeing process.

The biggest question that I hear uttered from my husband's lips periodically as he trips over my bag of wool or has to navigate around me in the middle of the kitchen is, "Why?" Why am I bothering to learn how to spin one sheep's worth of wool? The reasons are two fold. 1) It gives Lambie a reason for living. How insane is it to keep this crazy, random sheep fed and housed if she does not give us anything in return. Sheep are good for two things - meat and fiber and as much as I was against getting her in the first place, I honestly can't see taking her to the butcher at this point, not when she has spent the first months of her life living in my entry way behind the door - that practically makes her family. 2) it is something that I have always wanted to learn to do.

I totally understand that it is much easier to go to a yarn shop and pick up whatever yarn I like in any color and style, but I know this sheep and her wool, I know what had to be done to get the wool, and I know this spinning wheel and the ancestors that used it before me. I feel more connected to this yarn than any that I have ever picked up in any shop. It may not be the finest and it may end up being difficult to knit with, but I have raised, sheered, carded and spun every fiber of this yarn. I like to think that Grandma would be proud.

The Advent of the Lamb

I had nothing to do with this one. In fact, my exact words were, "No! They are nothing but problems....No." But, I guess I shouldn't really have been surprised when my words were not heeded.....she was really kind of cute.

It is a problem when the bus driver, who sees your kids every day and talks with them, also happens to raise sheep. It was early spring, lambing season, and he happened to talk with the kids about taking on a bottle baby lamb. The kids, of course, then passed this on to Keith.

We had just put a new roof on the "chicken shed" but had agreed that there was plenty of room in it to add a few other animals. Little did I know how quickly that would happen....a bit like Field of Dreams "if you build it, they will come".

Somehow, and here is where is all gets a little questionable as to who actually called whom initially, but Gene and Keith somehow got to talking. I have my suspicions that it was Keith that called Gene. Regardless, I came home from work to find a small, weak, seven day old lamb in my kitchen. She was all legs and really not much else - nothing to her. She was one of a set of triplets, and while sheep do alright with two lambs, three is a bit of a stretch to feed. This one apparently, was the odd man out at almost all the feedings. According to the bus driver, she had been drinking from a bottle, but that first night (and for many following nights) we struggled to get any milk down her at all.

We took her out to the shed because I just didn't feel that it was good to get her used to living in the kitchen....that didn't work - it was just too dark and cold to leave that tiny little beast out there all alone! We tried to introduce our outdoor dog, in the hopes that her Great Pyrenees breed would come out and take to her....no go, but she did almost have lamb chops for dinner. We thought that maybe even something like a cat would befriend her and help her out....nope, they were too freaked out by her, but they did want her milk.

Back in the house we went and we set up a place in the basement for her to live. The containment was essentially the same as the original brooder that we had used for the chicks when they first came. This confinement lasted all of about 20 minutes. But, she did find a spot in the corner to call her own, so we went with it and moved the straw and blankets to that corner of the basement which was close to the wood burning stove....smart lamb.

Approximately one week into this little lamb adventure and she still wasn't gaining any weight. That is not a good thing in a young lamb's life. Babies of all species need to be taking in enough nutrients and calories to grow - she hadn't grown a bit. We despaired that maybe she wasn't going to make it. Then I stopped and remembered that I am, in fact, a veterinarian and should know how to handle this conundrum.

The next day at work I gathered together a few items that I thought might be of help, namely a 60 cc syringe and a red rubber feeding tube. She had to have nutrients one way or another and if she didn't take it in herself, then she was going to get it via feeding tube. In general, this isn't too difficult of a thing to do for most animals. Sliding a tube to the back of the throat naturally elicits a gag reflex and they swallow and if you pass the tube with the swallow....it goes down the right tube. I showed my husband how to check to be sure that it is in the stomach - there should be negative pressure on the syringe when you pull back. If the syringe fills with air, you have inadvertently passed the tube into the trachea, or windpipe, and that can cause huge problems if you were to then pass the formula down that tube right into the lungs.

So, after refreshing myself with how to do this, and then teaching Keith how to do this, "Lambie" was thereafter subjected to three times daily feedings whether she liked it or not. That, and a shot of penicillin and she was well on her way to gaining weight.

We tube fed her for about three weeks and then, finally, the grass started to green up a bit and suddenly she realized that she was a herbivore. She never looked back after that point, but she had developed quite a bad habit of coming into the house. For the three weeks that she was being tube fed, she occupied a spot either behind our front door amongst the shoes, or downstairs in the basement by the wood stove. She bonded to my husband because he was, after all, her main care giver. She followed him all over the farm and would bound around him like a crazy gazelle, pronking, leaping and inadvertently running headlong into him and anything else that was in her way.

I think the original plan was to raise her up and then take her to the local butcher shop. That is very hard to do with animals that you have tube fed, worried over, and then watched grab hold of life for all they are worth and enjoy it with as much vivacity as a baby lamb. I suspect now that Lambie is a permanent, life long resident of the farm.

A Fence Emerges

As much fun as it was to have a lamb come traipsing into the house, it was also kind of messy as they are not exactly careful about where they leave their deposits. We had to have another place for her to stay. The north corner of the chicken house was fixed up into a very nice stall for her to stay in during the nights and during the day, she wandered around with Keith. We needed a fence however, and this became readily obvious when she wandered up to the house and happily started nibbling on my tulips. She is actually lucky to have survived that event at all.

A fence was planned out and materials purchased. I attempted to set a few posts, but as is typical, they were not just the way Keith had pictured in his mind, so I let him take over and slowly, the fence emerged. "Your fences need to be horse-high, pig-tight, and bull-strong. " Keith got all of those with the fence that he put in. You would often see him out there tamping in a post with Lambie attempting to climb on his back.

There is a reason that I originally said, "No" to this whole lamb idea. I grew up with a bottle lamb, actually two of them....Burt and Ernie. Ernie wasn't bad, but Burt would head butt you really hard any chance he got. I was happy the day that Burt left the homestead. We had another sheep at some point too named "Doc" and he would get out and promptly steel something from the shed and drop it somewhere out in the yard. This became a real problem when my dad was fixing a car and the sheep kept running off with parts. Lambie was working at becoming as much of a nuisance as Burt and Doc had been, but the fence did seem to help rein her in a little. Add to that pasture a Shetland pony that we had received a few years earlier and they were pretty good buddies. The thing that we didn't realize in putting in the fence was that the chickens now were within a pasture as well. We thought that they would leap over it - they are fully capable of leaping at least as high as the fence, but they seemed oddly content to stay within its confines as well. We now had quite a farm yard - chickens ranging around, a pony and a willy-nilly sheep that seemed to get a profound kick out of herding the feisty rooster "Brownie" around. She was the only one that he didn't spur every chance he got, he would instead flee from her. I think it was mainly that she was just so unpredictable - like a bipolar person off their meds, you just never knew what she might do.

Food is a huge thing for Lambie - almost ironic in some ways given that we couldn't get her to eat for the first three weeks of her life. She and Casper vie for any chicken feed that they can possibly lick out from under the dog of the chicken coop, and if anyone happens to leave a door unlocked you can bet that Lambie will be in there and she doesn't hesitate to let in anyone else to help with feasting on any food that she can uncover. More than once we have come into the chicken shed to find it in complete disarray with Lambie happily munching down on cat food and a flock of chickens at her feet helping as well.

How To Shear a Sheep (or Not)

If we weren't going to use her for lunch meat, we had to come up with some purpose for her existence on the farm.....not that the horses really have much use, but they clean up any hay that we have lying around. Sheep are a wonderful dual purpose farm animal - meat and fiber are both possibilities, so we opted for the fiber. We weren't about to splurge on an electric clippers for one sheep, so we thought that we would try the old fashioned way of shearing a sheep - hand shears. If you have never seen one of these, they look like really big, sharp, metal scissors that are sprung so that the only motion you have to do is to close the scissors to snip the wool. Biggest drawback is that it requires a strong wrist to use these babies and you are working on a living animal that is not always lying still, so you are almost bound to snip the skin periodically as well as the wool.

Lambie had no idea what was coming for her the morning that we decided to give it a try. The entire family meandered out to the pasture to watch the event. The book makes this look like a fairly simple thing. Usually, when you get a sheep set up on their butt, they kind of relax and stop wrestling.....or so the book says. Lambie clearly did not read this part of the book. The book also shows just one person doing the shearing and holding the sheep all at the same time. Clearly, this was a person who had had more practice than we did.

She came to Keith, as she always does, and he attempted to get her set up the way the book describes, on one hip. The hard part was that she weighs almost as much as Keith does. What followed was similar to watching a wrestling match, and unfortunately Keith wasn't coming out the victor without a serious fight. It was amazing to see how many legs a four legged creature seemed to have when she was struggling to stand up right. Eventually, she was brought down for the count, but it was more or less on her side and it took both of Keith's hands to keep her that way so there was no way that he was going to be able to use the shears at the same time.

I launched in with the sheep shears and managed to get going on quite a roll. Once you find the plane in the wool that is actually clean, it goes along quite nicely, but then you have to flip the sheep over at some point. This allowed Lambie the upper hand for the moment and she used it to her best advantage. She jumped up and was off like a shot having now decided that these people were clearly out of their minds. The book also mentions trying to keep the fleece clean. This is very hard to do when half of it is still attached to the sheep as they are running through all kinds of farmyard muck.

Another few minutes to catch her, another wrestling match and she was down on the other side and the sheering could continue. The only time she would really flail was when the shears would inadvertently pinch some skin, but unfortunately that usually led to a hoof to the head or a lip or some other sensitive body part.

Eventually, the wool was off. It wasn't necessarily pretty, but it was off. Lambie looked a little like a piece of foam that had had chunks cut out of it, but she didn't seem to mind all the kids giggling at her new do. Now, what to do with the fleece, which was nowhere near "fleecy white" It was full of dirt, manure and straw. Washing was the first order of business.

Dawn dish soap, Woolite and a lot of patience are necessary to get wool clean. I washed it twice and got all the gross disgusting things out of it. I wasn't perfectly clean, but good enough to start carding. I found some carding combs on ebay and had them in hand within a few weeks.

Now, I would love to be able to say that I have taken the time to card and spin the wool, but unfortunately, I have not. It sits where it has been for several months and taunts me with tracking down my grandmother's spinning wheel which currently resides at my parent's house. Maybe with next spring's wool, which I picture as a perfect, clean fleece obtained from a calm, relaxed sheep, I will feel inspired to card and spin it all. But then again, it is Lambie I am dealing with.