Make Your Own Wool Wreaths

Something fun for the holidays (or year-round)!

Would you like to learn to needle felt?  Are you looking for a neat hand made gift idea?  How about a fun and easy make together activity?

These cute little wool wreaths are one of my favorite things to create and I think you'd enjoy making them as well.  They look harder than they are and I love the soft smooshy feel of the wool.  Can you guess which sheep this is?  It's a fun one :-).  It's not Maisie.  Maisie and sharp needles*...yeah...Not. Maisie :-o.

The kits include detailed instructions, a thick foam felting pad, felting and darning needles, vintage burlap wool sack material for backs and bows and enough wool to make two ornament size wreaths (with a little extra to stick in a tree for the birds :-).  Make one for yourself and one to gift or make them together with your best wool friend.

Once you've made your wreaths, the foam and needles can be used over and over to make all sorts of other needle felted items.  

Make your own ornaments kits $25.00

Completed (I can make them for you :-) ornaments $15.00 each

Custom (pick your favorite sheep) ornaments $20.00

If you'd like to order a wreath kit or anything else from the farm shop, just send me an email with what you'd like and where it should be shipped and I'll pop it in the mail to you with an old school invoice and a return envelope.  

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* The needles ARE very sharp, so I'm hesitant to say these are kid friendly.  Please use common sense and good supervision...even for yourself...just saying ;-).

Watching...

...for fall?  For rain?  For cooler temps?  For the upcoming Kentucky Wool Festival?  For a new puzzle :-).

This has been the hottest September I can ever remember.  We are still in the 90s and my "if I can just make it until Thursday..." has been changed this morning to "if I can just make it until Friday."  If this trend of pushing back the end of this brutal heat stretch continues, it's just going to become "I hope I make it..."

To make matters worse, other than a freak rain storm yesterday morning, we have had no rain.  Everything is brown and crispy and when the wind does blow, it's a hot wind that does nothing to help anyone.  Speaking of the freak rain, it rained 2" at the house, but only 3/8" at the Wool House, just yards away.  The rain was that spotty.  

Hank is doing pretty well.  His foot has healed up beautifully, but he's back obsessively licking both of his elbows now and right after I took this picture I had to stick the cone of shame back on him :-/.  They are actually blow up pillows now and if it wasn't so blasted hot, it probably wouldn't be that uncomfortable to wear, but still.

I'm in the final crunch week of getting ready for the wool festival.  My Ohio Valley Natural Fibers run scheduled for last week was cancelled, but they are hoping they can run my roving this Tuesday.  I have my fingers crossed, but am still stressing about a contingency plan if they can't get their machine back up and running.  

I've got a good amount of wool pumpkins made, lots of wool balls, quite a few mini wreaths and I'm finishing up some big wreaths.  I'll also have all the usual Punkin's Patch "swag" in tow and hopefully some felted sheep as well.  The calendars won't be ready until after the festival, but we have plenty of the "...and to all a good night" Christmas cards packed up and also mixed sets of all 15 years.

Tring Farm has eight pretty raw fleeces to sell and for some reason Andy and Tavia's fleeces (two of my favorites) didn't sell back in the spring, so I'll have them there as well.  Everything else is washed and ready to process,  so it will all work out somehow.  

The booth will be full and fun and pretty and if the forecast holds, it should be a great weekend.  We might even be able to wear some wool in the evenings...which seems odd to say after so many weeks/months of not breaking out of the 70s at night.  

I'll believe it when I see it.  I'm watching!

[Sheep] Business Saturday

Because shopping with Maisie is way more

...um...interesting than going to the mall!

We are developing an exciting new program here in the commonwealth (Kentucky is a commonwealth, not a state), The Kentucky Fiber Trail.  Kentucky is already well known for it's Bluegrass Trail (horse farms) and Bourbon Trail.  Now you can discover fiber farms throughout the state as well!  

Our farm shop (and barnyard :-) will once again be open the Saturday after Thanksgiving (November 30, 2019) from 1:00-4:30 for Small Business Saturday.  We'll call it Sheep Business Saturday :-D.  

We'll have calendars, fleeces, roving, spindle kits, Christmas cards and ornaments, wool sheep pins, a few wool wreaths, maybe some felted sheep and for fun, let's make Maisie Orneries!  I'll have a basket of "Ornery"  supplies set out and teach you how to make your own wool roving wrapped ornament.  

So, come hide out (bring your wheel! :-) on the farm with us that Saturday and take care of all your sheep and fiber-y gift giving needs.  We promise you won't be mobbed by fellow shoppers...unless you have cookies ;-).  If you need directions, just drop me an email.  

The 2017 Kentucky Wool Festival

Well, another Kentucky Wool Festival is in the books.  Whew!  This was probably my favorite booth set up to date.  Or I should say booth design.  The set up was as brutal as always :-o.  A huge thanks to Auntie Reg and Uncle John for all their help.  Setting up a festival booth is not for the faint of heart!

The weather was atrocious - upper 80s on Friday and Saturday and then deluge rains on Sunday.  Still, the crowds were heavy (even in the rain!) and they were happily spending money, which was a huge relief.  Maintaining a flock of increasingly aging sheep is not for the faint of wallet and we desperately needed a good show.  Thank you!!!

Here are a few booth shots.  

Can I say once again, Thank You, Auntie Reg!  Not only do you keep everything running smoothly, but you are a great salesperson.  I am Not Good at self promotion.  It was a huge relief to hear you covering that awkward part for me.

I've never tried to make something like felted wool pumpkins before.  If I'd had any idea how cute these would turn out, I'd have been trying to make them all summer.  They sold out quickly and I was sad to see them go, but I can make more and that bushel basket paid for 83 bales of hay :-D.

There were some funny votes for sheep throughout the weekend.  It was pretty much a toss up between "Maisie" and "Everyone because I can't pick a favorite."  I guess because a vote for everyone includes a vote for Maisie, we'll let her think she "won".  The prize for playing was a packet of farm note cards.  

The fleeces inside the booth were from the Christmas Lamb Camp lambs, just recently shorn.  This was one of my favorites.  

Tavia was the festival's "cover sheep" this year.

I think the wool wreaths were very pretty.  That is Petunia on the left and Blossom on the right.

I made some Biscuit and Muffin Christmas ornaments that look like the Tour de Fleece ravatar.  Instead of grazing on clover, they are eating hay...since that's what they'd be eating at Christmas time :-).

I really like the new small tote bags.  I really like the original bags, too, but since Biscuit, Muffin, Mrs. Pepperpot and the Ts weren't on there...  

A few felted sheep.

And a few you can wear :-).

If you saw the new table cloth at the Kentucky Sheep and Fiber Festival in May, you may remember that only baby Biscuit was looking at the spinning wheel.  I can no longer think of Biscuit without Muffin, so even though she wasn't technically here when she was a tiny baby, she was already in our hearts so I painted her on :-).

I have some cute 20 pictures to share tomorrow.  For now I'm signing off and heading to bed.

A Big Weekend

"Where are we going?"

"To the Turkey Trot Memorial Stockdog Trial at The Training Center!"

I was honored to create the prizes for this year - sheep and wreaths made from wool from three of the actual trial sheep.

This is always one of my favorite weekends.  Usually I "clerk" (write scores for the judge), but this year Kate and I are going to be up on the hill "working the pens" (sorting out the groups of sheep for each competitor).  I can hardly wait!

Also this weekend...Maisie's birthday!  Big number 4!  I have all the ingredients to make her cake (a box of Cheerios and a wax number 4 candle ;-).  She can hardly wait!

I Really DID Live Through The Wool Festival

So it looks like I broke the internet.  I FINALLY put together a blog post yesterday and right as I was close to publishing it, a major Verizon tower went down and the entire area was without intertubes until early this morning.  Oops... :-o

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Friday?!?  I really not sure where the week went. Heck, I'm not even sure where the summer went! The Kentucky Wool Festival went really well.  We could not have had better weather, the crowd was the second largest in 34 years (somewhere around 50,000 over the three days :-o), saw lots of old friends, made some new ones, sales were good, nothing got pinched and I think everyone had a great time :-).

As always, I had tons of good help.  Miss B and Miss L helped get the booth components ready ahead of time.  Auntie Reg and Stella worked in the "sweat shop" getting everything packaged and labeled. Saint Tim did his usual herculean job getting all my printing ready and the four legged family, for the most part, stayed out of trouble.

Tim covered farm duties, a Unit driving neighbor came over to doctor on T-Bone's leg (horrible dew poison this year :-o), Miss B and Always Amazing Aaron answered questions throughout the day and helped get new spinners started with their drop spindles and Auntie Reg did a great job basically tripping people coming into the tent and sending them in to buy stuff ;-).  

I am Not Good at "selling myself".  Oh, if you come in the booth and ask me a question, I talk until your eyes glaze over.  Having to go up to you and say "Hey, look at all this cool stuff I (and our sheep) made to try and support my bad sheep habit!"... I don't know why I can't do that.  And it's important.  This is what pays for the hay, straw, grain, shearing, vet bills...  Luckily I have a great team.  I appreciate everyone way more than they can even imagine!

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I figured too many days had passed to do a booth tour, but I've had several requests from friends who couldn't be there, so here goes.  I missed a few things taking pictures.  I had so many bags of roving that we pretty much had to tie the booth together to keep it from exploding, but you'd never know by these pictures.  The funny thing is two of us were taking pictures and we both missed that and a couple other things.  

I loved having the raw wool out front.  It was pretty, attention getting, folks were looking for wool at the "wool festival" (it's primarily a huge craft fair with tons of great food and live music) and didn't smell up the booth.  I personally love the smell of raw wool, but as the temps climbed on Friday, it would have been a bit much for non sheep people perhaps ;-).

The usual card display.  What am I going to do with a 13th card next year?  

Volumes 1 and 2 of the Mug Shot Mugs.  

I actually made some felted sheep!

And wool wreaths, which Miss B did a fabulous job embellishing with all sorts of flowers she gathered their garden and fields again this year :-).

I made quite a few medium size wreaths, too, and even figured out an ornament size wreath...that neither B or I took a single picture of...and there were 24 of them in the booth!  How on earth we missed them and all the roving...

Punkin's Patch swag.  I think this design is really cute, but non blog readers didn't "get" it.  That's okay.  I'd rather they were "ours" alone anyway.  If you don't know who Punkin or Miss Ewenice or B. Willard is...

You know what I just realized?  There are no pictures of the 2017 Equinox Farm and Lamb Camp calendars!  Now I'm wondering if I'm missing files on my camera card.  This just makes no sense...

Edited to add:  And while I was waiting and waiting and waiting for the internet to come back yesterday I realized that there were also 24 Maisie Orneries and 24 Ornerie kits that neither Miss B or I took any pictures of.  That's a lot of stuff in a small area to miss getting in a picture somehow!

Anyway, back to the tour...

I had a super cute vintage Ashford Traveller for sale, but it was too crowded to set it out where someone could really try it.  It belongs to a friend's mother who is down-sizing and she has a regular and jumbo flyer, extra bobbins, a copy of Paula Simmons Spinning and Weaving With Wool and it is tuned up and ready to go back to work in case anyone is interested.  

We  sold 20 spindle kits!  As I ordered another 100 wooden wheels last month to make them, I realized that I've made over 200 spindles over the last 10 years.  That's kind of crazy in a sort of exciting way. If even only 10% of those folks stayed with it (like Miss B did :-) that's 20 new spinners! Definitely not a dying craft.

These are the prettiest wool balls I've ever made.  I almost hated to sell them, but what on earth would I do with 150 wool balls?!?  Inside joke - that's my most common question "What do you do with a wool ball?"  I just consider them neat decorations, but most were buying them for dryer balls. Anyway, they were made from the tiny throw away fleeces from Levi's cousins who got shorn this fall.  Perfect! 

Once again, my favorite part of the booth was the digital picture frame.  One thing I forgot to do was update the photo file, so we re-watched the same 2000 (!) pictures I used last year.  No matter.  I was happy to see the oldies.  If you don't already have a digital frame, go get one.  Just priceless to be able to watch and watch and watch.

Punkin's Patch.  All from one little lamb years ago.  You know, sometimes the whole thing just seems unreal. As the sun set and the night lights came on and the really good bands started playing while the dinner crowd grew and I was finally able to stand still and catch my breath and look around, I couldn't help but wonder a bit.  How did all this happen?

If you'd have asked me 25 (or so ;-) years ago what I'd be doing with my life, raising sheep and being a fiber artist teaching people how to spin yarn would never have crossed my mind.  Never. I don't really know what I would have said, but I can promise you it would not have been that.  What a privilege.  

I appreciate everything way more than anyone can even imagine!

Weekend Wrap Up

The week's end wrap ups are working well for me! Doesn't hurt that it's winter of course, but there were actually several "spring" days this week, but only in temp, not in grass/weeks growing...  I have determined my year end goal for 2015, but now that I'm typing this out, I'm realizing that my more immediate goal is going to be to keep things moving in the "pipeline" once spring starts.  That's a pretty tough challenge.

Mini bows for mini wool wreaths.

I am quite happy with these mini wreaths and if I can figure out a way to incorporate some of their different construction ideas into the large size wreaths, everyone wins.  The large wreaths are so beautiful, but they are hand killers.  

I think these are cute.  And look at all the different colors!

That's because I got four fleeces washed during the "spring break".  Light and medium gray, black and white.  

Kate supervised...and I think was a bit disturbed by the whole process.  She came from a Katahdin farm, so the whole wool aspect of sheep is new to her.  You don't have to shear Katahdins and you sure don't put them in a washing machine ;-).

I think I'm getting close on the Mug Shot mug design.

And then look what happened!

So in the spirit of the Iknitarod, I pulled Maisie down out of the loft and started spinning :-).  Since she has figured so prominently (and not necessarily in a good way) during the last two years of the Iknitarod, I'm planning on knitting a Maisie sweater this year.  Hopefully that will keep her out of trouble...at least for two weeks!

Petunia and I smile at big fat snow flakes :-D.  I may have taken some a lot of snow pictures last night and this morning.

How did your week wrap up?

Woolfest Wrap Up

This is going to be picture heavy because I liked my booth set up this year and want to be able to repeat it. And while I liked my set up last year and thought I'd repeat it again this year...I couldn't remember how we did it. So, let's take a (map-able) tour.  I'll try to point out some fun and/or historical highlights to keep it sort of interesting ;-).

I use this quarter round shelf as a work space and it probably goes without saying that I "straightened it up" before I took the picture ;-).  

If you look to the right, you'll see a picture of Punkin from years ago.  My friend Julie took it and it's one of my prize possessions.  I hadn't brought it for a few years, but felt sentimental this year and packed it along.  

I really just can't believe I went from one pet sheep that I didn't have any interest in taking pictures of (but loved seeing pictures other people took of him) and gave his wool away each year to now a whole flock of sheep, a small hand spinning business and a big girl camera of my own.  Isn't life funny. Punkin would be amazed.

On the left.

Back wall.  

If the amount of merchandise looks a little light, that's because I wasn't smart enough to actually use my big girl camera on Friday, so had to re-take all my pictures on Saturday.  Sales were good all three days :-D.

I had four wreaths made and could have sold many more.  Get. Organized. Earlier.  Next. Year. There was something about the dark brown one that I decided I just couldn't part with, so I put a pretty high price on it in hopes it wouldn't sell...and two different people tried to buy it.  Luckily we were having terrible luck getting the credit card readers to work.  Whew!

Moving on to the right side.

I hang up some of my finished items made from our wool in hopes they inspire spinners new and old less new.  There are tags on each one giving the sheep's name and explaining that they are not for sale...  Saturday was so cold that I wore B. Willard's barn sweater.  I left his tag on to identify him and couldn't figure out why folks kept calling me Bea :-).

I usually use this table for weighing wool and keeping my drop spindling supplies handy.  I thought it worked well for calendars and Lamb Camp cards, but the scale in the back of the booth wasn't super handy (Note to myself for next set up).

Saint Tim had both calendars ready for Saturday, thank goodness, and I am so sorry for the folks that came by Friday to pick them up.  I got them put together and "sent to the printer" late and he really had to jump through some hoops to get them done for me. 

You will only get that kind of service from your local printers (and so many other small businesses that are quickly getting pushed aside by volume corporations :-/). While getting "500 business cards for $10" sounds like a good deal, if you need any special services (design assistance, rushes, corrections...) that those internet printers won't provide...well, I'll get off my soap box.

The Lamb Camp cards and calendars are really cute I think :-).  I especially like the cover of the calendar and can't believe I didn't pick that as one of the original 10 card designs.  I am going to look into doing some prints this fall.  I think my photography is getting good enough that that's not an unreasonable idea.

Speaking of photography, here's a funny story from the weekend.  So I always run this neat digital picture frame on a continuous loop of pictures of our farm, sheep, dogs, cats, horses...so visitors who don't read the blog can get an idea of our farm and see how the sheep are raised and know how much we love them...

I always use the same thumb drive/storage device to store the pictures.  It lives in the box with the frame.  I took it out, plugged it in my computer to add some newer pictures (which I did manually so I'd know exactly what was being added), plugged it back in the frame and Friday morning turned it on.  

The pictures started like normal...and then a couple scrolled on that I was pretty sure weren't supposed to be on there.  I watched for awhile and realized that it must have pulled all the pictures off my blog (or something).  I didn't think that much about it though until Small Farm Girl came in and saw herself on the screen!  She'd been at one of our Hug a Sheep Day open houses :-D.  

My first thought was to take it home that night and try to fix it, but as the day went on with all sorts of crazy, random pictures from all over the place flashing up there, it turned into a fun game waiting to see who or what might show up next.  The realization that Graham Lamb's contact information kept popping up might answer a few questions ;-).  Luckily no little kids were in the booth when the pictures of 20 drinking a beer came around :-o.  

Oh look, a flood washing out my lavender garden.  Yep, that makes it look idyllic here!

Tim doing a Shawshank Redemption shot when he got to the Flambeau River a few years ago.

Excellent, let's give Brooks Brothers some free advertising.  Seriously though, those were some AMAZINGLY cute lambies! :-D

It was an endless source of fun and people started hanging around to watch just to see what might come up next.  And with 4400 pictures on there (!) you really never knew WHAT that might be :-D.

20 said, "I think I earned a beer yesterday when those ladies were pinching me on the butt through the back of the chair!"

All in all it was a wonderful weekend!  Sales were great, the weather was perfect Saturday and Sunday (and not horrible on Friday) and some of the nicest and neatest people came by and visited all three days.  Definitely one of my favorite festivals so far.  Thank you!!!