Sheep to Shawl

Myself and several members of the knitting and spinning groups I belong to took part in Heritage Farm's Sheep to Shawl event on June 2nd.  Not like the competitions, but we were showing how the wool goes from sheep to something wearable.  We had stations for washing, natural dyeing, different fibers, carding, weaving, spinning and knitting.  It was a lot of fun.  I didn't get a lot of good pictures of the actual event.  I stole the picture of the sheep from Haley.  There are a lot of good pictures in our newspaper the Herald-Dispatch.

  

This is a picture of Mary.  She is a dorset sheep.  She was our mascot for the day and hung out at our tent until it was her turn to get sheared at the end of the day.  She was a lot of fun and liked to get her head scratched.

 

Mary was just one of the sheep that was sheared that day.  There was some lovely Jacob fleece that got to come home with me.

And some Southdown fleect.  Which is great because I haven't spun either of these breeds before. 

We also had a few natural dye pots going.  I brought a few skeins of yarn to toss in.  This is some Patons Wool in  Osage Orange that was in an iron pot. 

A random skein of a grey yarn that went into the madder root pot.

And some random yarn that also went into the madder root pot.  In all, it was a really fun day.  It was great to be able to educate the public on what we do and pick up a little bit of fiber along the way.