The Independent Stitch

Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival 2012

I'm so far behind on blogging that I'll never catch up, so here's an overview of this year's wonderful Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. I taught a two-day workshop on rare wools, participated in as much of the book signing as I could get to, and facilitated two walkabout classes in the barns, which was a new event and a lot of crazy fun.

Here's everybody except the photographer (and me; I'm organizing things off to the left) concentrating on a new fiber. (Thanks, Nancy, for taking pictures while I was all-out focused on teaching!)

One of the biggest reasons that I love teaching is the great people I get to meet. And that's a roomful of them.

And here are the fibers at the start of the workshop:

We worked our way through them over two days. Our selection for this workshop included:

• Black Welsh Mountain
• Clun Forest
• Dorset Horn
• Gulf Coast Native
• Jacob (American)
• Leicester Longwool
• Navajo-Churro
• North Ronaldsay
• Oxford
• Romeldale/CVM
• Santa Cruz
• Shetland
• Wensleydale

. . . and, courtesy of BitsyKnits, a sampling of Sharlea, which is a rare wool although not from a rare breed (it's specially grown and prepared Saxon Merino).

Thanks once again to The Spinning Loft and Spirit Trail Fiberworks for making these workshops possible. There's no way I could acquire, wash, and prepare all the fibers myself. I do some of that work: The Spinning Loft does most of it, with essential contributions from Spirit Trail.

On several of the evenings, after we had finished teaching, Maggie Casey and I were lucky enough to walk around the lake near the hotel. (I was looking for a photo of Maggie, but we'll have to settle for a selection of her DVDs and her book.)

The barn walkabouts on Saturday and Sunday mornings were amazing. Registration was limited to a small group so we could move with relative compactness through the barns and talk about wools in connection with the sheep that grow them. We only had time to do barn 8: and it was a full three hours! There was a lot of variety in breeds and many topics to consider. The walkabout description said we'd cover between 10 and 12 breeds. Because they were there, we saw and talked about more than 25!

On Sunday, I juggled myself back and forth between the walkabout, the book signing, and the Parade of Breeds, which is my favorite event at the festival. Here's a Border Cheviot (in front) and a Border Leicester (behind):

My favorite Shetland ram was there again, once again charming everyone within viewing distance. This year he had been shorn before the festival—many more of the sheep were in their summer wear this year than usual. The dogwoods and azaleas had also passed their bloom-time (climate change affecting shearing, as well as blossoms?).

Sue Blacker and Douglas Bence of Blacker Designs and Blacker Yarn in the UK attended the festival and gave a presentation on the value-added work they do to increase shepherds' and farmers' income from the fiber their animals grow. One of the things they have done recently is work with some wonderful, visionary people to produce what is likely the first commercially spun Boreray yarn, and here's a ball of it!

Boreray is a rare breed of sheep from the same small set of islands, called St Kilda, that are home to the Soay. This Boreray yarn is one of two that the Blacker mill is producing. The other will be a blend of finer Boreray fleeces, hand selected, with Soay wool, as a St Kilda laceweight. I can't tell you how exciting this is. It's one of the fantastic ideas that grew out of the odd experience that was UK Knit Camp in 2010.

What with teaching, book signing, and a few wonderful meetings, I finally got to walk around the festival for a short while at the end of Sunday. I spent most of that time taking pictures of sheep. And this Karakul sheep from Redgate Farm looked exactly like I felt at that point:

So it was time to call the festival a huge success and wonderful time, and to go home.

At least for a few days.

Rare Breeds Survival Trust's 2011 Watchlist for sheep

The Rare Breeds Survival Trust, which monitors the status of livestock breeds in the British Isles, has published its 2011 Watchlist of breeds that need attention to stay, as they say, off the slippery slope to extinction. From the whole list (a PDF), I'm focusing here on the sheep:

Categories are based on numbers of breeding females.

CRITICAL (category 1)

• Boreray

ENDANGERED (category 2)

• Leicester Longwool
• North Ronaldsay

VULNERABLE (category 3)

• Castlemilk Moorit
• Devon & Cornwall Longwool
• Hill Radnor
• Teeswater
• Whitefaced Woodland

AT RISK (category 4)

• Balwen
• Cotswold
• Lincoln Longwool
• Manx Loaghtan
• Norfolk Horn
• Oxford Down
• Portland
• Soay
• Wensleydale
• Whiteface Dartmoor

MINORITY (category 5)

• Dorset Down
• Dorset Horn
• Greyface Dartmoor
• Shropshire

A few random notes:

* The Norfolk Horn is not the original breed, but has been bred back up from near-extinction (just a few sheep), using in part one of the more modern breeds that had previously been developed from a Norfolk Horn foundation, the Suffolk. Called the New Norfolk Horn for a while, the "New" part of the name has now been dropped, even though the successors may only carry part of the genetic heritage of the original breed.

* The Isle of Man cares so much about its traditional Manx Loaghtan sheep that during the foot-and-mouth epidemic of 2001 the parliament, known as the Tynwald, cancelled one of the island's highest-earning tourist events (a massive and famous motorcycle race) in order to reduce the possibility that the sheep would be exposed to the illness.

* The Dorset Down and Dorset Horn are not the same as what is often just called the Dorset (also known as the Polled Dorset, which, oddly, originated in two different locations from two different breeding efforts). (The Dorset Down is one of the six basic Down breeds. The Dorset Horn and the Polled Dorset, while they have Down-like wool, are not on that short list.)

* The Southdown is not on the RBST list, but is on the similar list prepared by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy (ALBC). The two organizations have different criteria for evaluating populations.

The information released with the new edition of the watchlist notes that some livestock breeds have recently become more vulnerable because of world economic conditions. People who could previously have kept a small flock have had to sell their animals.

I like the format of the new list. It also notes that, over time, the following sheep breeds have progressed from category 1 (critical) to category 5 (minority) and currently have large enough populations to have been discharged from the equivalent of the breed ICU (intensive care unit), at least for now:

• Black Welsh Mountain
• Hebridean
• Jacob
• Kerry Hill
• Lleyn
• Llanwenog
• Ryeland
• Shetland
• Southdown
• South Wales Mountain
• Wiltshire Horn (a hair sheep)

A separate section of the RBST site tracks breeds of sheep that are vulnerable because their populations are concentrated in very limited geographic areas. The categories are based on how small an area contains 75 percent of the breed's population. Breeds at risk for this reason include:

CRITICAL (category 1)

• Exmoor Horn 
• Whiteface Dartmoor

ENDANGERED (category 2)

• Rough Fell

VULNERABLE (category 3)

• Herdwick

AT RISK (category 4)

• Devon Closewool

MINORITY (category 5)

• Devon & Cornwall Longwool

You'll note that the Whiteface Dartmoor and the Devon & Cornwall Longwool face the double whammy of limited overall numbers and high geographic concentration.

Changes among the sheep from the previous list

I need to keep and archive copies of the official lists, marked by the year (the RBST PDF for this year is clearly labeled, but I think that's new). I do have extensive notes, and copies of web pages, and (somewhere) dog-eared copies of pages pulled from old copies of RBST and ALBC publications.

Breeds don't tend to move quickly up or down on either the ALBC or RBST lists: conservation is a slow process. For The Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook, co-author Carol Ekarius (the livestock person, to my fiber side of the equation) wisely suggested that we provide a label for "conservation breeds" instead of listing specific categories for the individual breeds. That overall status isn't going to change quickly, whereas the breeds' specific locations within the population assessments do move over broad swaths of time.

Handfuls of individuals can make a major difference in a breed's prospects—in either direction. Any shift in status, either up or down, is worth remarking on.

According to my notes, there were two shifts among the sheep from 2010 to 2011.

• Cotswold moved to category 4 (at risk) from category 5 (minority)
• Whitefaced Woodland moved to category 3 (vulnerable) from category 4 (at risk)

These breeds have both moved in the more vulnerable direction, toward lower populations. They are breeds with very deep histories, each located with a specific landscape.

Cotswold

Cotswold, one of the luster longwools, comes from the Cotswold Hills, on the western and southern edge of central England (how's that for a confusing description? check the map for the area I'm talking about). The breed once was a major support of the British economy.

It is a lovely handspinning wool, excellent for knitting and crocheting and exquisite for weaving. The breed contains genetics for a range of shiny fleece colors from black through a variety of grays to glistening whites.

Whitefaced Woodland

Whitefaced Woodland, from sheep with durable constitutions that originated in the southern part of the Pennine mountain range, produces fiber that is quite variable from animal to animal, with some coarser and some relatively finer (although none gets past "medium" in feel). The wool, like their faces, is white.

I knitted the swatch with Aran-weight Whitefaced Woodland yarn from Garthenor (spun at Sue Blacker's mill). The pattern is #107 from Knitting Patterns Book 250 by Hitomi Shida.

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P.S.

Sheepwatching notes: Even though its breed is not labeled, and I am (as noted above) a fiber rather than a livestock person, and I'm open to information that might correct my notes, if I had to say what breed is in the photo at the top of the RBST's list I'd sure pick Oxford.

The sheep in the photo is undoubtedly one of the six core Down breeds, because of its colored face and white wool—well, and the general shape of the face. Three of the six core Down breeds are on the current Watchlist (Dorset Down, Oxford Down, Shropshire; a fourth, Southdown, is on the ALBC rare breeds list; Hampshire Down and Suffolk are not on either list). There are other breeds that have colored faces and white wool, but the Down breeds have a kind of characteristic "puffy" look (that's a highly scientific descriptor that I just made up).

It isn't a Dorset Down, because they have lighter colored (generally brownish) faces. (It's not a Dorset Horn, because they have white faces and they also have distinctive horns on both rams and ewes!)

Shropshire is another possibility, and Shropshires' faces are darker than those of Dorset Downs, but they have a somewhat differently shaped profile and growth pattern of wool on the face.

Although not all Oxfords have as much wool on their faces as the sheep in the picture, many do (and some have even more). Plus the face shape is Oxford-y, if I dare say such a thing. Oxfords are sturdy sheep, and they are exceptionally large. Size isn't something we can gauge from that head shot, but we can get hints of posture. And that sheep looks like it's standing in an Oxford pose: sort of upright and staunch. I vote for Oxford.

Reviewing, writing, and proofing

What's been happening around here is this.

1. Review of selected bast-fiber yarns (in this case, linen and hemp, including some blends) for an upcoming issue of Interweave Knits.

Deadline met.

2. Writing an article on Soay sheep for an upcoming issue of Spin-Off. The initial agreement was for 1,200 words. A few days before deadline, I asked editor Amy Clarke Moore if she'd like a bit more, because I had more to say about Soays that applies not only to that breed but to the stories of other breeds, plus great photos, plus. . . .

She said to keep going until I'd said what I wanted to. I did. It's somewhat longer than 1,200 words. . . . It's intended for the Summer 2011 issue.

Soay ewes in the morning at Saltmarsh Ranch.

Deadline met.

3. The final, final, final set of pages for The Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook arrived for their final, final, final read-through.* At the same time, we are still dealing with photo permissions. While I was writing this post, we learned that permission is proving more difficult to obtain than expected for one of the images, and were asked to say whether the proposed substitute would suffice. (It will.)

* Except that I was just asked if I can review the color proofs in a couple of weeks, to make sure that the fiber samples have not changed to inaccurate colors during pre-press adjustments. Yes.

I have built the pages a custom case by recycling parts of the UPS box they were delivered in yesterday morning. As on the previous proofing pass, I need to take the pages on an airplane with me and to work while traveling. The case protects them with minimal bulk (the as-was UPS box was too big). It also serves as a makeshift "table," because I tend to find myself in situations where I don't have access to a desk. Actually, I don't even have an open table at home. Everything's covered in boxes of wool. That's why I often retreat to the library or a coffee shop.

Deadline to be met.

4. Tuesday was the day when I ended up responding to an e-mail about something critical (which required thought and, sometimes, research) at what felt like on average every 7 minutes (I have not calculated). It was like a ping-pong game with me at one end of the table and multiple folks at the other end. (It's possible that each of my correspondents also felt the same way.) The messages related to a number of topics. The only break occurred when I left the house in the afternoon for a couple of hours to keep an appointment.

Here are some sample e-mail time-stamp sequences from the day:

am 8:56 / 8:58 / 9:00 / 9:01 / 9:06 / 9:15 / 9:41 / 9:52 / 9:53 / 9:54 / 9:59 / 10:00 / 10:01 / 10:08 . . . .

pm 12:02 / 12:03 / 12:08 / 12:40 / 1:11 / 1:22 / 1:23 / 1:24 / 1:28 / 1:29 / 1:30 / 1:35 / 1:36. . . .

Deadlines met.

5. I wrote workshop and retreat descriptions for SOAR 2011 in New Hampshire (October). (NOTE THAT scholarship applications for SOAR are due next Tuesday, February 8, 2011!)

• Three-day workshop (Monday through Wednesday) 
  Four-wheel Drive Spinning: An In-depth Look at Rare Wools
  You don’t need a lot of experience to enjoy this class in unusual wools—just a willingness to have adventures. Rare-breed wools come in a huge variety of colors, textures, lengths, and descriptions. They can also be hard to obtain, and spinners often don’t know how to begin working with them. Come get your hands on a selection, and learn how to feel comfortable in the spinnerly wilds! Beginning with the shearing season and a group of special contacts, we’re collecting, for this workshop’s pleasure, fleeces from as many as 15 rare breeds of sheep listed by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy and the Rare Breeds Survival Trust. You should have plenty to experiment with in class, and perhaps a bit extra to take home and play with.

• One-day class (Thursday)
  Let’s Get Out of the Middle of the Road! An Introduction to Rare Wools
  Here’s an all-day excursion that will introduce you to some of the types of wool grown by rare breeds of sheep. We’re putting together a diverse collection of fleece varieties—aiming for 8, so we’ll have a very busy day—to whet your appetite and increase your confidence in dealing with unusual fibers.

• Retreat (four half-day sessions)
  Straying from the Path: A Sampler of Rare Wools
  Come join a quick jaunt through the possibilities of rare-breed wools. You’ll get an overview of what breeds are rare, and why, and you’ll get your hands on samples of at least 6 breeds. Because of the time constraints, this will be a quick hike through the territory, but you’ll come away with a good idea of what the fuss is all about.

• Notes for all sessions
  Skill level:  Advanced beginner—need to know how to do basic spinning and plying.
  Students should bring: Wheel or spindle; fiber-prep tools of choice (combs, carders, flicker, or any other OR dog-grooming combs or slickers); the ability to wind a small centerpull ball and ply from it (or skill at Andean plying); pencil/paper; optional tape and/or hole-punch, for keeping track of fiber samples and yarns (record cards will be provided); (for three-day workshop only) sampling tools as you wish, like knitting needles, crochet hook, or Weave-It or similar extra-simple loom.

Deadline met early. I don't have time to think about this later! Gotta help gather fiber!

. . . because I've also been working with Beth Smith, at The Spinning Loft, and Jennifer Heverly, of Spirit Trail Fiberworks, to track down the materials for these classes. The wools are rare. We need fairly substantial quantities, and we need to make sure that the breeds whose wool we obtain represent a good chunk of the spectrum of fiber possibilities (they can't all be longwools, although that would be fun . . . and I think there may be a SOAR class that does focus on them . . . ). We need to start collecting and washing now.

(Oh, and I need to proof pages.)

6. Revisiting the description for the workshop I'll be teaching for the Conference of California Handweavers in California in May (also gathering fibers for that as we speak). It's a two-day workshop on rare-breed wools, intermediate in scope between the SOAR one-day and three-day sessions.

So I'll be teaching on the East Coast and the West Coast this year. The only PROBLEM with teaching at SOAR and CNCH is that I want to be a participant in several of the other class offerings! I may also have one class happening in a western plains state, although that hasn't been firmed up, and I'm not sure what it will involve. That's probably it for 2011.

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Those are the biggest items that are happening around here this week.

I hope to take a break later this week and post some photos of tracks and scat that I took last week in the mountains (was it only last week??), in the interest of identifying some of our neighbors, mostly the four-footed ones.

And now I'm going to pull those pages out of their case and take another close look at them.

 

Visiting Soays (rare sheep!)

I'm still on the road—getting ready to leave a motel in Elko, Nevada—so there will be photos here but not much text.

A couple of days ago, I had the pleasure of visiting some folks who have Soay sheep. Soays are as close as we have to the original domesticated sheep. They were located only on one island well offshore of western Scotland, and may have been there for thousands of years. A small population on a rock out being battered by the Atlantic Ocean is vulnerable, so now there are satellite flocks elsewhere.

Priscilla and Steve Weaver at Saltmarsh Ranch have a large satellite flock and are working on maximizing genetic diversity within the breed. Steve is a geneticist. They have both British and American Soay flocks. They are in love with their Soays. It's very easy to see many reasons why.

Soays in the morning:

Soays are tiny sheep, which doesn't exactly show in these photos.

 

Their friend and guardian, Isaac, who is significantly larger than they are:

He keeps coyotes away. There are four guardian dogs with the Soays at Saltmarsh Ranch. I fell in love with Isaac.

Also Molly (Mollie?), the herding associate, who injured a leg recently and has to be on forced rest for a bit.

Although, as you can see, she is always on the alert for a bit of work she might do:

Maybe she could help????? With ANYTHING?????

These Soays are clearing underbrush: eating star thistle and blackberry vines in preference to the grass. They'll eat the grass if all the good weeds are gone.

These are young Soays:

We went out to look over and snap photos of the rams, several of whom are going to other farms fairly soon (with genetically diverse ewes). They are identified as to lineage by the tape on their horns (all Soay rams and many Soay ewes have horns).

 

I have more photos, but I don't have more time at the moment. There's a great article on Soays in the January/February 2008 issue of Hobby Farms magazine.

Yes, Soay wool is fine and spinnable. There isn't much per sheep each year and it tends to be on the short side, and it roos (sheds) instead of being shorn, which makes gathering it a challenge. The quality of the wool, however, is part of what makes Soays the link between wild sheep (which you can see in their coloring and some of their behavior) and early domestication.

And now I-80 calls me again.

Organizing fibers for the big project

There will be two versions of this post. I hit the wrong button and published it at the note-taking stage. If you're reading this note, you likely have the full post.

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Keeping the fibers for this project organized and constantly identified is a job in itself. Having edited Spin-Off for so many years, I knew how challenging it can be to try to remember which of several closely related fiber samples the one you set on that table over there was, expecting that of course you could remember what it was . . . oops, that was day before yesterday, something came up that needed to be dealt with immediately, and was that the Dorset from project A, or the Hampshire from project B? Dang.

Anyway, I started off with what I hoped would be a flexible, strong organizing system. It evolved slightly. For example, instead of trying to economize to the penny on labels, as I did at the start, I now print plenty in both sizes and keep coming up with ways in which they're handy to have.

So the first large chunk of work to be done when I receive new fibers involves entering them in the inventory sheets (two separate databases), printing up their labels, and making the bags and cards that will keep everything sorted from receiving through photography, and perhaps beyond.

I print two sizes of labels. The large ones go mostly on the bags, and the small ones go mostly on organizing tools. Extra labels are top center. To their left, a tag for a sample skein (there will probably be at least one more skein label, which is a reason to have extra small labels, but I start with one). The large card next to the tag stays with the wool during washing and other processing. The small card goes at the edges of photos so we don't have to keep massive notes about what fiber was in which photograph. We shoot the tiny card at the edge of the image and it can be cropped out later. Small labels also get used when I pull a sample for OFDA testing (scanning for the physical fiber qualities, including length and micron counts).

There are two large plastic bags, one that will stay with the bulk fiber supply and one, marked "samples," that will go in the file that will be transported to the photo shoot. There are two small plastic bags, one for raw wool locks and one for clean wool locks. All of the labels on the plastic bags have to have clear tape put over them or they won't stay stuck to the bags. (There's one more larger card with a large label that goes in a card file, a physical inventory record, which comes in very handy despite all the computer database information.)

Once the fiber's checked in and the organizing tools are prepared, it's time for washing. This is when fibers will most likely get confused, so I need to pick batches that can be distinguished from each other and that fit my various colander-and-bowl configurations, which have different capacities.

In this morning's first batch, I have three black wools and one white. The three blacks are easy to tell apart, even though two are Soays. My larger cards from the photo above (they're old business cards) stay in the room with the fibers being washed, then travel with them to the drying racks and stick around until the fibers are dry and back in their labeled bags. I've already pulled the grease locks on all of these, of course.

Here are the pots of water on the stove, heating up to supplement the tap water for getting the wool clean.

And here are some of the washing-related systems: the baggies in the white not-a-wastebasket are the fibers currently in the tub. The box contains a few of the fibers next in the lineup (there is another large box to its left, out of sight . . . I'm pretty well caught up, but got five new samples yesterday). The post-its on the outside of the box have small labels on them. With more than forty file boxes in action, it's good to be able to tell easily what's where. The bright yellow means the sample started as grease fleece. Light yellow means it started as clean fiber. There would be a black checkmark on those labels if they'd been washed already. I'll have more shots of boxes later.

Okay, I'd better get this really posted. The truncated version would be pretty funky.

Bummer about the Soay sample; North Ronaldsay's truly fascinating

Soay: sample not looking so hot

Here's what you don't want in a fleece, especially from a rare breed: sunburned tips that snap off. Sometimes sunbleached tips on a fleece are just fine—the color has lightened or gone brown without weakening the fiber very much. Sometimes the damage goes too far. Especially bad when it's a hard fiber to get, like Soay, a breed that's been around since the Stone Age (that's before the Bronze Age and the Iron Age) and doesn't fit the industrialized agricultural model in any way. It's far from impossible to get Soay, but when you do get it and it falls apart . . . that's a problem.

The top lock is the original form. The bottom two locks show what happens when I pull—not even very hard—on those crispy, brown tips (they feel like pencil shavings).

Also, at the bases of most of the locks is a bunch of scurf, or skin flakes, that can be removed from a fleece but the fiber needs to be able to withstand extra handling, which this wool won't. If just the tips were damaged, I could snip them off. But the rest of the staple feels crispy (therefore fragile) as well. Hmmm. What to do? I don't know yet.
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North Ronaldsay

North Ronaldsay's another very old breed. Most writings say Iron Age, but recent DNA testing says it goes back farther.

Working with this sample was slightly challenging, too, because the breed's fleece has a tendency to form matts at the bases of the locks (an incomplete transition from naturally shedding to needs-shearing types of sheep) and the tips of the locks were stuck together.

However, the tips didn't break off and I was able to flick both ends of each lock on a fine-toothed hand carder and separate the fibers, which I then spun on a hand spindle. It made quite a blissful yarn--not much of it, because I have to move on, but I could feel the North Ronaldsay's close relationship to Shetlands as I spun. (Some North Ronaldsay fleeces feel closer to other relatives.)

The wee two-ply sample skein is drying (in this photo, it was still singles).

A clean, unprepared lock is on the bottom and one of the prepared locks is on the top. It's a Magpie spindle.

One little surprise on this sample was that when I checked it into the tracking system I wrote "light gray." Obviously, it's pretty darn white. It's amazing how the dirt in a fleece can shift the perceived color of unwashed wool. Spinners find this most disappointing when they think they've found a light brown fleece and it turns out to be cream or white.

Part of what I learned today is why the matting forms at the bases of the locks within this breed—which gave me more patience in dealing with it. I also wrote up most of the material on North Ronaldsays, with all sorts of additional information that I, at least, find really cool.

One breed a day? Oh, I hope not! This project will take forever, and I have until the end of summer.
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Hat from the booth of El Centro de Textiles Tradicionales de Cusco at Maryland Sheep & Wool

I promised a more accurate photo:

Isn't it lovely?

And as a bonus here's a better photo of the breed-specific skeins I bought at Maryland:

That helps me keep my perspective about things like disintegrating Soay wool.