Smoke and simmer
Raven brought us the lights of the sun and moon in the creation stories from this part of the world; maybe our resident pair can set the skies to rights again?
Smoke from the Oregon wildfires has brought a sudden false fall to the islands. On Thursday the birds went still and the mustangs were wide-eyed and edgy, dashing out of their stalls at any strange noise or movement at the margins of their vision. Sheep, it turns out, can be marvelously steady animals. An unkind analysis might conclude that they lack imagination or the intelligence to sense danger in the smoke; I think they carry instead the judgment to distinguish between a threat like a strange dog that they might fight or flee and a shift in conditions that must simply be weathered. In the same way that they endure hot afternoons by clustering with heads held low in their collective shade or ride out a storm lying in the lee of a windbreak, the flock are staying calm and waiting for things to get better. We bring them extra hay to keep them happy and lower their stress levels, keep the fresh water topped up, and just hope we won’t see a tender point in the middle of the fiber when we shear. Sudden stress to their bodies—illness, lambing, breeding, lack of access to food or water, a predator attack, or environmental hardships like wildfire smoke—can ruin the whole fleece by creating a weak point in each fiber of the animal’s coat. The locks will break cleanly at that point when you pull the tips and butts, halving the staple length. There have been years where the wool clip for an entire region is destroyed by wildfire stress to the sheep, and this could well be one of those situations.
These yearlings grazing the common land at Three Meadows don’t seem fussed by the smoke.
Elaine is getting creative about her access to the hay pile.
On the bright side, it’s been a good time for indoor work, and luckily there are 80 skeins of Haven DK newly back from the mill to be tied, scoured, mordanted, and dyed. The garden has produced an abundance of dye plants, so nearly all of the yarn we offer for sale this fall will be colored with homegrown botanicals.
The fleeces for the Cheviot-based yarns Haven and Luff and the BFL x wool for Selkie made the trip down to Abundant Earth Fiber, where they’ll be processed in a month or two. The Finns have been shorn and we’re waiting for a nice weather window in the next couple of weeks to do the Finn x BFL lamb clip. With all that new yarn in the pipeline and certain family members gently hinting they’d like the laundry and dining rooms to return to functions other than drying wool, we’re planning for a shop update October 1! We’ll try to run a series of updates over the span of a few weeks so you’ll have multiple chances if the yarn goes quickly. In the meantime, we hope you’re staying safe, healthy, creative, and dedicated to justice and equity.
