Once Upon A Time

Once upon a time there was a little lamb living in London, England.  Not out in the countryside, but right in the city!  They've never shared how they got rescued by Loved Before, but their adoption profile said their name was Merino and that...

"Despite being a sheep, they never grow fluffy wool and shiver in winter.  Once, they tried to warm up by snuggling with the cat, who was not amused.  Merino's charm lies in their endless quest for warmth and their knack for finding the sunniest spot."

I'm sure it's no surprise that I couldn't resist helping a little lamb.  Even stuffy sheep need to be rescued sometimes!

Merino arrived safe and sound, albeit a bit chilly because it was so long ago it was still winter.

I set the Iknitarod vest aside and started their sweater right away.

And to help Merino not feel too homesick, we watched eleventy episodes of  The Great British Baking Show.  

 

And then, like magic, a warm wool sweater.  Not really.  I've never managed to pull off a quickly knit sweater before, so why start now.  It's been long ago enough though that I don't really remember what my issues were except for general nit picking and needing to make the sleeves longer.

The best part was how both sheep made a new best friend and enjoyed all sorts of adventures together as we got back on the Iknitarod Trail.

And it turns out, Merino just hadn't found the right cat to snuggle up with.  Bullseye made a couple of new best friends as well :-).

The yarn for Merino's sweater was some Woody that I'd spun for the Tour de Fleece a couple of years ago.  Little sweaters like these are a fun way to use up sample skeins and practice new techniques...like knitting sweaters.  

And the 2025 Tour de Fleece starts in just over two weeks.  

WHAT!?! :-o

My Favorite Sheep...Of The Week

This week's Sheep of the Week is Spud, although as I scrolled back through all the old Spud posts, he was usually referred to as Sweet Spud.  

Spud arrived here in the summer of 2014 along with Murphy and Woody to be buddies for Baaxter.  They got into all sorts of fun that first year.  Besides normal teenage hijinks, they dressed up for Halloween and even had a Christmas party.  Do you remember the Spaceship?  He was one of the Spaceship sheep :-).

Spud earned Sweet Spud by, well, by being sweet.  He loved Hank and would always stop to visit with him and "close talk".  Hank never seemed to mind.  Spud would also check in with me almost every morning, lean into me for a sheep hug and we'd visit for a couple of minutes before he headed out for breakfast.  

My favorite Sweet Spud story however, is how he was one of the main Sheep Chicken sheep, helping the old hen up onto her perch each night.  My favorite of those posts was this video.  There are several pictures and a couple of videos of the sheep working to help that old hen.  I loved that.

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The picture up top was taken last winter.  It's the December picture on the 2023 calendar.  Salt was Miss December in 2022.  That calendar is still hanging in the wash room.  I can't bring myself to take it down.  I doubt I'll take 2023 down at the end of this year either.  I had to make the hard call this past week.  

Sweet Spud

Spring 2014 - February 13, 2023

He was one of the very best.

Amazing

When I was putting together the Hug A Sheep Day post last week I googled "hug a sheep day" to see what would be the best link to share...and couldn't get over how many links were posted to not only the daily calendar sites, but also from farms from all over the world!

I watched several and then found a video The Fiber Pusher posted from our farm party in 2019.  Grab a cup of coffee and some tissues and give it a watch.  It's so nice to see so many familiar faces and old friends.  

  

Oh those good old dogs and sheep.

Tour de Sheep

 

My Tour de Fleece is more of a Tour de Sheep this year.  So far I've spun 10 sample skeins.  Let's see if I can remember them all...PPPP, Henri, Petunia, Boudreaux, Woody, Buddy, Rebecca Boone, Count Chocula, Miss Ewenice and Hershey :-).

I have really enjoyed pulling out these old friends.  I'd forgotten how soft Boudreaux was, how luxurious Hershey was, how...everything Miss Ewenice was.  She's been gone 10 years now.  I have some Renny set aside for tomorrow.  I can't spin Ewenice without spinning some Renny :-).  

The Right Words

I'd been thinking about my Tour de Fleece for several weeks and was not getting super excited about any of my possible plans.  I knew Pinto was going to be the captain, but had a ton of trouble coming up with his graphic.  The weather is miserable.  There will be no peaceful porch spinning around here this year.  Honestly, I was feeling a bit of dread thinking about putting it all together.

Tim and I like to play a few of the currently popular word games each morning.  I play Wordle, both Word Hurdle games and the Quordle, which is trying to guess four words at one time.  It took a good while to talk me into trying them, but now I'm hooked.  I sit on the Wool House porch with a big cup of coffee and start guessing. 

The Wordle for July 1, the first day of the Tour de Fleece was...

Can you even believe it? :-o

It gets better.

The TdF plan I was most leaning towards was doing a deep dive into some of my most treasured fleeces.  I'd just finished spinning a bit of PPPP and was feeling sentimental.  I have Woody's lamb fleece, Daniel's lamb fleece, some special Ford, Henri, Petunia and for a really deep dive, some young(ish) Miss Ewenice.  

I was still not completely convinced...but I couldn't come up with any better ideas.  I really needed to find some inspiration or it was going to be hard to cheer lead the other members of my team when I couldn't even cheer myself along.  

I started working on the day's Quordle.  

As you can see from the PINTO graphic above, as you guess words, you almost always get some correct letters and sometimes even get them in the right locations.  Yellow means the letter is in the mix, but in the wrong position.  Green means it's the right letter in the correct location.

Three of the four words in the Quordle game behaved accordingly and I ended up figuring out each of those three words.  The fourth word...

The first guess yielded me no correct letters.  Neither did the second guess.  I did finally get one letter, but in the wrong position on the third and fourth guesses, but back to zero correct on the fifth.  In case you are wondering about my word choices, remember I'm trying to guess three other words at the same time.  STAID, BASTE and RAMEN were the correct words in the other quadrants.

You get nine chances to guess the four words.  I'd used up eight chances and only had two letters and both in the wrong positions.  I had one chance left, but I knew it was hopeless.  Still, a game is a game and I decided to make a wild guess and see how close I could get.

With only one vowel possibility, the O, I knew there might be a chance they were going to use it twice.  Y hadn't been used, so I tossed that in there as well.  Two Os and D and a Y...I had to go with WOODY.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

And I won!

How's that for some inspiration :-D.

It was pretty crazy just to get PINTO, but also WOODY on the same day?!?

 So I started my Tour spinning some Woody :-).

Spinning With Friends

I recently finished painting a spinning contrast apron for a good friend who's been a good friend to my flock for many years now.  These are all sheep she's spun except for some Lila she gifted back to me when I was collecting fleeces for the bottle lamb yarn.  

Well, all except one.  How we missed Blossom/Baba when we were counting up sheep...  I'm looking forward to her bringing it back so I can add her in.  

Jared and Rocky

Maisie and Hank

Levi, Andy and Woody

Rebecca Boone, Beanie Baby, Elizabeth, Lila.  Wait...  Holy smokes, I think we forgot Buddy, too! :-o

Good Sheep

We lost two good sheep today.  One I loved from the very day I met him and one who took 15 years for a truce friendship to form. 

Woody has been terribly sick.  It took a long time to figure out what was going wrong, but he bravely fought like a warrior for four long weeks.  I just don't have the energy to type out what all was/went wrong.  I will say that if you have a sheep that's just "not right" and you can't figure anything out, ask your vet to test for anaplasmosis.

We had a great team of people helping try to keep him going long enough for the treatment to work.  No one worked any harder than Woody.  And in classic Woody fashion, he stayed cheerful and friendly and patient and let me know he knew we were trying to help him.  

He'd had to move into Easy Breezy because Jared was not being nice to him, but he liked Cheeto and Willard and they had fun sharing some hay together and I thought things might be turning around.  Last night he seemed a little down and when he asked to go back in with his old friends, I decided that might be a good boost after a long, hot day.  

I locked Rocky and Jared into Del Boca Vista so they wouldn't cause him any trouble and when I left at the last check he was out in the barn lot cheerfully eating some hay with everyone.  I looked forward to seeing him out grazing with them the next morning.  

Sometime during the night I think he stumbled over the board at the end of the stall and he landed hard and in a bad position and in his weakened condition could not get himself back up.  I found him early this morning, but the damage had been done.  We worked hard all day in hopes he'd rally, but he let me know he was too tired and that was our deal.  He was one of my all time favorite sheep.

Woody

May 2014 - August 9, 2021

Beanie Baby, on the other hand, was never a favorite sheep.  In fact, there was an incident years ago involving Ewen McTeagle that if it hadn't ended well for Ewen (due entirely to Beanie's irrational stupidity), I'd have...well, let's just leave it at that.  "You are here.  You are part of our family.  I'll take care of you.  I don't have to like you...and, honestly, I really pretty much don't."

Beanie Baby was one of the sheep who looked at me. And while he spent many years trying not to catch my eye at all, the last couple of years, as he's gotten old, I'd catch him making eye contact with me and I think he finally understood things like not getting shorn with the main group in the spring and me shearing him by hand once the weather was good and warm.  

That if he could bring himself to duck through an opened gate that I'd give him some much needed grain. That if he'd let me catch him and pick dried mud from between his too tiny toes that his feet would feel better.

This spring he just laid down on the shearing stand and let me give him his summer haircut.  And I was happy to do it.  I gave him a good scratching when we were finished and told him he was a good sheep.  He still wasn't my most favorite sheep...but after all those years, we'd finally become friends, maybe even good friends.

Over the weekend I noticed some flies buzzing around his bad horn.  He'd cracked it on something and it was infected deep inside and while we were able to clean it up enough to get him through the weekend so our favorite vet could check him, I had a feeling that at 16 years old it was not going to be something we were going to be able to fix.  

Beanie Baby

April 2005 - August 9, 2021

 

July

July was a hard month...but we are all still here.  As I finally worked on my month end compilation I kept coming across pictures I'd taken for blog posts.  Stories I wanted to share...and just didn't.  I'm going to try to return to them.  They are good memories.  There have been some bad memories too...but they deserve sharing as well.  

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A post shared by Sara Dunham (@thecrazysheeplady)

All Together Now

"Yum!  Icicles!"

"Dude, you better be careful.  You know what can happen!"

"I can't believe he's doing that."

"I tried to warn him."

"Spud, it's okay.  I'm just using..."

(All together now)   

"...my teefers!"  :-D

So Hot

Heat is much harder on sheep than cold. Yet another reason I know I'm a sheep.  We are all miserable...but hanging in there.

Woody

Maisie

Spud

I made the mistake of sharing the following video with Saint Tim and a couple friends.  Now whenever I complain about the heat they all say (very melodramatically) "Oh, it's so hot.  So, so hot."  I'm glad I still think it's funny.  Mostly ;-).

Enjoy :-D

Two Birds...

I posted five pictures to Instagram and tried to just embed the post here, but I don't think all the pictures were going to come through so I've copied and pasted it over here mostly to let you know Rebecca Boone is still fighting and maybe showing a little improvement and also a little Liddy and Woody to make you smile.  Those bad Mooses though... ;-).

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First an update on Rebecca Boone- she’s still fighting and maybe a little better this morning. Thank you for all the prayers and concern. I love how we take care of each other. It matters. 

If I’d read forward on the Fiberuary list I would have held off on my pictures from the other day because I actually nailed several challenges that day . So I’m not just sharing the same pictures for days, I’m going to combine a few challenges with this post, which also gives me a little more room to keep my focus on sheep care.

Days 4, 5, 6 and 7 - Close Up, WIP, Outside, Technique. 

The close up of my work in progress that I was knitting outside looks complicated, but it’s not! Only one color per row and the patterning comes from a simple slipped stitches technique 

I included a picture of Liddy because... Liddy . The two Moose thugs pillaging my knitting bag while I was rescuing the short dog who was on the wrong side of the gate. And the muddy hoof print at the top of the super close up . Oh, and that’s Woody, the king of close ups.

#fiberuary #fiberuarychallenge #agatecovehat #farmyarn #lambcamplegacy #lambcamplegacyyarn #knittersofinstagram #barnyardknits 

Drizzly Day(s)

This group was the last to run in during the latest shower.  I always think it's interesting to see who pairs up with who.  The Jacobs always stay together and I love that old Clover Belly is welcomed into their "clique".  Rocky and Jared, Woody and the Mooses are mixed in this time.  The Adventure Sheep ain't scared of no rain...or much rain ;-).

Two new puzzles for everyone who's not as adventurous :-).

Sleeping Off The Cookie Hangover

Silly old Blossom.  She's the most non-active sheep on the farm...until the cookies come out.  Boy, she was wound up last night!  That's Woody in the foreground, still hoping there might be yet another cookie party ;-).  I bet this would make a fun puzzle!  

Merry Christmas!

A Live Christmas Eve Cookie Party

"Do we get to have two parties like we did last year?"

The sheep would like to do the Live Christmas Eve Barn Parties again this year :-).  I don't remember any problems from last year, so if anyone does, please remind me!

If there are no changes, we'll do it like last year and at 9:30 p.m. I'll go live on Facebook and then go live on Instagram at 10:00.  I think the FB video is automatically saved and the IG video will save for 24 hours so you can watch it later.

Here is a link to the Punkin's Patch Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/MyFavoriteSheep/  I think you just need to go to the page to start watching.  You shouldn't have to join anything.  If it's more complicated than that, somebody please chime in!

Here is the link to the Punkin's Patch Instagram account. https://www.instagram.com/thecrazysheeplady/  I'm not sure if you'll have to have an IG account to watch a live video there or not.  Again, someone chime in with further instructions for those of us over 12 who are super techy.  

If we don't "see" you this evening, we all wish you a very Merry Christmas!

2019 Hug A Sheep Day

We ended up having a great farm party to celebrate (Inter)National Hug a Sheep Day this year.  Quite a few people braved the weather and while 20, warm and dry in the Wool House, got the most actual hugs, there were enough cookies flowing out in the barn so no sheep felt left out on their special day.

Amy (Auset Images) battled the dark barn and got so many great pictures that I couldn't narrow it down to just a few to share here, so what follows is picture heavy.  She's posted all of them to a gallery where you can not only view them, but if you'd like to purchase copies for yourself, it's quick and easy to do.  

The Fiber Pusher (aka Kaala's mom ;-) also took a bunch of pictures and some video and has shared those on her site as well.  The first part of her video is some footage of the sheep and sheep silliness and the second half of her video is a time lapse of the barn aisle throughout most of the afternoon and it's a hoot!

Woody kept everyone entertained with his obnoxious amazing gate climbing skills.

Look!  It's the lil' darlin' (Maisie ;-) politely begging for cookies.  Will wonders never cease...

Jared was once again the biggest fan of Feed A Sheep A Cookie Day.

He mugged worked the crowd the entire day and by the end was so jacked up on cookies and crackers that I wasn't sure he would ever leave the barn again to go out and eat healthy grass.  He was still wound up the next day!

Big Moose couldn't believe we would host a party just for him two weeks in a row.  I'm not sure what he's going to think this Saturday when no one comes to see him...and feed him cookies ;-).

Oh look, it's Jared, back for more "hugs" ;-D.

Auntie Reg stayed warm and dry in the Wool House and enjoyed visiting with everyone :-).

Murphy, Chocula and Woody run a racket where they come out to the gate, grab as many cookies as they can, then run around to the side wall and stick their noses through and swear they've not had any cookies yet ever and then go back out to the gate...

"Hey, mister?  Could you tell all the kids with cookies to come back, please?"

I periodically took cookies out to the shy sheep so no one got left out.  Muuuufin ;-).

Follow this link for even more pictures!

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Now here's where things get super awesome.  If you follow the hashtag #hugasheepday on IG or #hugasheepday on Twitter you are going to be AMAZED at how many folks around the world were hugging sheep with us!  And these were just the ones who used the hashtag.

Remember when we had our first Hug A Sheep Day here at our little farm nine years ago?  Seriously, go click those two links (you don't need an account).  You are going to be blown away!  

All from one little sheep...

Happy Hug A Sheep Day everybody!...everyday :-).