Our first precious baby arrives!
Today we welcome the FIRST ever birth here at Fancy Fibers Farm.
Meet Flower’s kid, still to be named!
Flower is a red angora, although clearly her baby is black!
Aren’t genetics wonderful!
There are more pictures on our Flickr site, in the “Farm Animals” set.
Enjoy!
By Ounces and Yards
The GREAT thing about handspun yarn is that it is truly UNIQUE! It is like NO other yarn anywhere, and that means that you can knit a garment from it that is like NO other garment anywhere!
The not-so-great thing about handspun is that it doesn’t come with a label on it that tells you how many yards you have! Yes, you can figure it out, I suppose, by figuring out the length of a round around your niddy-noddy, then multiplying by the times of yarns you’ve been around. But even that is only a guesstimate at best because you may have stretched it, or not stretched it, or been on the inside or the outside (like a racetrack).
How to solve this problem? With a swift, an electronic yarn meter, and a ball winder!!! We now have all of these wonderful things in the Farm store! When you buy my handspun yarn, you will know EXACTLY how many yards you are buying, and the corresponding exact weight. Pretty cool, huh? No more guessing whether or not you have enough to complete your pattern!
Well, there’s always that little “knit to gauge” part, but that’s for another day!
Here are three short video-clips that show Mom at work, winding some handspun yarn into balls. (Everybody works at Fancy Fibers Farm! LOL!)
Using the Yarn meter from Mary Berry on Vimeo.
Using the yarn meter #2 from Mary Berry on Vimeo.
Using the Yarn Meter #3 from Mary Berry on Vimeo.
Dancing With the Stars (of the Farm)!
We have SUCH talented animals here at the Fancy Fibers Farm!
Why, just last weekend I found out that one of our alpacas and one of our goats can DANCE! Of course, they were motivated by the tender leaves overhead…. Such raw TALENT!
Workin’ and Playin’ on Easter Weekend
Daniel & James
You can work all day every day on a farm. I’m sure of it! But sometimes you need to just STOP and smell the wild onion grass, or whatever happens to be growing in your yard. There has to be both work and play, and that was the story at Fancy Fibers Farm this weekend.
Daniel and brother James (home from Texas A & M for the holiday weekend) spent a good part of Friday and Saturday with us, and got quite a bit of work accomplished. They loaded up a bunch of junk and took it to the dump for us. Some of the junk was ours, but a big part of it was the last (yippee!) of what the prior owner had left for us to clean up!
They also hung the screen door on the Bunny Barn back door which will be wonderful on these cool spring nights, and re-hung our chicken nest boxes, adding extra supports to keep them firmly attached to the walls even when some of the smaller goats decide to play on them!
The Welder impersonated a plumber for one more day to put the final fix on the persistent water leak at the border between our backyard and the small pasture. Ken was SO happy to have this fixed because this meant the water to the barns could be turned back on and he could quit carrying buckets out to the animals!
Bear supervised from the main barn. I plyed some yarn, and took advantage of the south wind to dry it.
This afternoon, DD#1 and her family, and The Prindles came to visit, eat, play with the animals and …. you know it …. ride on the golf cart!
The GrandGirls always go straight for the baby bunnies. These little guys are only 5 weeks old. Look how big they are! We got the bright idea of using some pen panels to make them a play area inside the Bunny Barn, but quickly found out they could squeeze their bunny bodies through the 2×2″ square holes with no problem! We had to give chase, get them all rounded up again, and the girls got in the pen with them and guarded the edges with outstretched legs!
Mandy cooked us a delicious dinner which we all enjoyed on the back porch in the cool breeze.
Lizzie put down her bunny long enough to collect the eggs, and Papa Ken gave The Prindles the nickel tour of the farm.
Bo helped me give the alpacas their annual booster shot, and every time we looked for the kids they were driving the golf cart. Look for the video in our next blog post!
Some work, some play, visiting with friends and family. It was a great 3-day weekend at Fancy Fibers Farm!
Ready, Set, Shear!
I spent today at A & A Alpacas, helping owners Amy and Arlin McCroskie shear the second half of their alpaca herd. It was a joy, a learning experience, and a whole lot of hard work! If my knees work tomorrow, it will be a miracle.
Still, as I said, it was joy! And I learned a lot about handling alpacas. Amy’s animals are beautiful and their fiber truly luscious! I had my hands in a lot of soft, soft fiber as I scooped it into bags.
On Monday, I take my 3 boys to be sheared. That will be exciting for me as this is the first time I’ll be taking my own alpacas to be sheared! Stay tuned for more info and pictures of the alpacas who live at Fancy Fibers Farm!
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- Ready …
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- Set …
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- Shear!