February 24, 2023
After a yearlong hiatus, we finally had the wool collection day for the CT Blanket Project. The mill in Rhode Island that had been making our blankets for years closed, and it’s taken this long to find a replacement. Saturday, though, we collected 1,800 pounds of wool, all of it grown on CT sheep farms. Yay!
Each participating farm brings their wool to be inspected - and each farmer spends time inspecting another’s. One by one every fleece is laid out on the “skirting table” and everyone around the table checks it out and either accepts or rejects it.
One farm’s fleeces were rejected because they used wood shavings for bedding, and the bedding was in the wool. Wood shavings are tenacious and won’t come out when the wool is processed and would have ended up in the finished blankets.
We had a couple of our fleeces rejected this year because the fiber was too short. Short fibers don’t spin together as well as long fibers and would have resulted in “pilling” in the finished product.
The short fibers were a direct result of our decision to shear our sheep twice a year, which we did because some of our Shetland’s fleeces were too long with just a single shearing. One of the frustrating things about livestock farming is that it can take a year to discover a problem in the making and another year to correct it. Now that we are aware that we have a problem, we are thinking about solutions.
We will always do what we think is best for our animals and for us that means shearing in March, before most of our lambs are born. It is easier for newborn lambs to quickly find the teat if the ewe is shorn. We have also found that in bad weather the ewe is more likely to choose the shelter of the barn if she is shorn, and her lamb will generally follow. So that dictates when we do our spring shearing. (March 26th this year)
We could shear at 8 months and then again 4 months later – throwing out the shorter fleece. But we also like to think of ourselves as a model for a financially viable small farm, so we need to make decisions based on what is fiscally responsible – ergo I’m not throwing out any fleeces!
We are also dedicated to educating the general public about small scale, ethical livestock farming and that means public events, live streams (and this blog.) Our shearing festival last spring drew 1600 people, and we scheduled the fall shearing for a school day so it could be livestreamed to any number of local classrooms. That’s a whole lot of educating!
So, we’ve decided to keep both shearings for now, and process our wool at 3 different mills depending on the length of the fleece. It also makes sense for us to shear all the sheep in the spring, and to only shear some of the sheep in the fall depending on how long their fleeces are. All of which requires lots of additional sorting of both sheep and fleeces. The dogs, in charge of sorting the sheep will be thrilled - Anne and I, tasked with sorting fleeces, are less thrilled.