Stitching with Our Sheep

Each week as I package and prep fiber arts kits to send to my students, I can’t help but feel a bit like Santa Claus, arranging and wrapping the adult version of stockings full of treasures for the learning adventures that will soon begin. I imagine the delight of my students as they open their kits, untie them, and lay out all the colorful objects.

For most of my classes, these treasures include either wool yarn or roving for weaving, stitching, hooking, crocheting, felting, etc. While there are many varied and wonderful wools available today, these are extra special because they come directly from my family farm and our flock of 150-or-so sheep.

Over the years, my sister Kara has tried breeds like Dorset and mixes with classic sheep dairy breeds like East Friesian and Lacone. Then she opted for the softer-fleeced Finn Sheep, and the hearty and kinky wooled Clun Forest. Lately, her mixes include a predominance for California Red, which is an offshoot of the Old-World Tunis line. This means our flock is a delightful mix of red, white, black, and spotted individuals, each with unique personalities.

After shearing, we lay out the fleeces on big tarps and begin sorting and skirting. In a typical year, we process about 800 pounds of raw wool, bagging it up in drum liners by color to then stuff into our cargo van for the long road trip to the mill. We hand pick out as much of the bedding straw as we can, as well as the messy “tags” that can gum up the carding machine. Our exam gloved hands tar up with the greasy lanoline, and we smell right mightily of dirty sheep in the process. Skirting can take days to accomplish, but at last all the wool is packed away, and I’m off making up my lists and color swatches for this year’s processing desires.

Requests include medium and thin yarns for tapestry weaving, thicker yarns for punch needle rug hooking, fine yarns for wool embroidery, and roving for needle felting. It can take a few or several months for the processing to be complete, but the arrival of the vanload of finished goods also feels like Christmas on the farm. Gleefully, I unload the bags of washed skeins or bundles of roving, rich and colorful, ready to be made into beautiful creations.

Shelves of the cozy yarn serve as part of my Zoom classroom background, and my studio is filled with even more shelves and bins and nooks stuffed with yarn. I use a puppy fence to herd one of each of the 38 colors of roving we carry into one corner, to avoid a total takeover of my fiber loft. Back at the farmhouse, a guest bedroom has been completely overtaken with the rest of the roving, as well as full fleece pelts made from our sheep. Everywhere you go on our farm, it’s all about the sheep!

As a class approaches, I begin assembling the materials, balling the yarn, and gathering up the tools and supplies. Some of the wooden tools are also created by family members, such as the beautiful wooden tapestry combs my grandpa makes. Each bundle is tied up with any necessary notes and printed handouts, then packaged off for shipments. Kits for my classes have traveled all over the country, including Alaska and Hawaii, as well as Canada and Sweden. With each kit comes a wooly piece of our farm, infused with our love and dedication for the land and animals in our care.

This week, I planned out a fresh wool embroidery course with the colorful finer yarns that just returned from the mill, stitching the slender strands through linen to paint a picture that reminds me of spring. The tactile process is calming and helps me focus amid the busy schedule of the week. Fiber arts have their own quiet magic to them that is both soothing and exciting as simple lines become colorful, warm expressions of creativity.

Stopping to take pictures to post online of the mockup’s progress, enthusiasm builds for the latest release from my studio. This goes beyond a “Look what I made” moment because, as a teacher, this is really a “Look what you’ll get to make” offering. The journey unlocks doors of opportunity, and students are already excited to be stitching with our sheep soon.

The whole process is very akin to how things used to be, long ago, when you made your own textile materials at home with what you could grow or raise. In many cases, this is a vanishing art, and supplies might come from as far afield as New Zealand or not even be of natural materials at all. Fiber arts are a beautifully tactile experience, and the non-commercial nature of our artisan spun fiber (with the occasional bit of hay or slight inconsistency in thickness) carry the story of life and land into the classroom of today, even as we Zoom into our sessions from each home or studio.

This is a unique and treasured experience to share with my students. Just like the choices we make in what to eat shape the future of the types of agriculture that will survive and thrive, so too do our choices in sourcing materials impact what is able to carry on. I choose local and sustainable, right here in this beautiful corner of the world. See you down on the farm sometime.