Summer Time

...and the living is easy. Maybe for some of us but I'm not a fan of the hot weather. We had a very cool spring all the way up tell mid June. Now we are in the 90's with a few 100's. A dry heat but still hot. All the natural grasses are dry now so the sheep are being fed grass hay.
The hay barn is almost empty and I've been cleaning it out getting ready for a truck load to be delivered this week. One hundred bales, 120#s each, will get me started. Then later when I have room again I'll get another load to get through the winter, maybe! I have more sheep this year so I'll see what happens. This spring/late winter the sheep ate out on the hill for almost six months. Best year ever for free feed!

I have a few sheep who after they are sheared in March get an inch or so of wool then start to lose their fleece. A natural spring shedding of the fleece. Hattie had a thin layer of felt covering most of her body. This morning she was in the barn and allowed me to start cutting off this sheet of wool.
If I get good at this, cutting it off, and she would get a full body felt, I'll have a pre-made rug next year. My other plan is to shear her and a few other sheep that do this in May or June to get a longer, full years worth of fleece.

The yard is green the hills are dry and I can't wait for October and cool days. I love to wear a sweater while I work.  I have been spinning fiber this last month. August means Fair time in Nevada and when I was looking around my room, studio is a better word if I were to use this room to make things, but as I was looking around I do not have one knitted, or felted item to enter in the fair. Luckily I have been spinning some of the Shetland wool I have prepared over the last year. I will enter two of the skeins below and it would be nice to actually have a sweater or vest made with my Shetlands wool. One I can wear and is made by me.
Also after the discussions this summer about Shetland Sheep and the type of wool they should and should not have I needed to prove to myself that my sheep can make the grade and these sheep passed! Mostly because they were to ones I had fiber washed and ready to spin.
These are all two ply. First skein is Bella, then Sisken, and Annie (I no longer have her) then Cielia and Charlie. Cielia is my new yearly ewe I got from Lois Moore last fall as a lamb.
I can get light colors on sheep to be soft but not as lucky in my breeding for black that soft. Cielia's fleece is to die for, a keeper!!

Then these, three ply yarns dyed by Capistrano Fiber that I got at BSG will be entered in the fair.