It started with a sheep ...

Rosemary and Rosemary's baby after 2020 shearing

Well it actually started with a property in Warwickshire that we fell in love with. Affordable because of its undesirable location between the A45 and a massive hole in the ground (workings for a depleted sand and gravel quarry). Plenty of work and 'potential' and over time house and land have shaped our lives, and we have restored the property. Previously city-dwellers we became happily rural.

Its quite a learning curve. Lesson 1: grass can get out of hand when you have four acres of it, so eventually we needed some form of grass guzzler. Mechanical or animal? Turns out sheep eat grass and appealed to us (small enough for us city wimps to handle). So we bought some sheep, lambed sheep, learned all sorts of sheep husbandry including shearing and - eventually - I learned to spin. Rather like the surplus of grass leading to sheep the surplus of fleece led to spinning. (The surplus of yarn led to other things which I will get into later ...)

So involvement with sheep started the ball of yarn rolling, although I did not realise it then.

We only have three sheep now. A family group of ancient Jacobs. These are a coloured (piebald) sheep breed which can have two or four horns. Or sometimes a different number. The two-horned mother here (Rosemary - now aged 15), has a daughter (Rosemary's baby as it were) who is currently 3-and-a-bit horned and was inititally five horned. She is a venerable 13 years and they keep company with sister/aunt Radish. They stay close together and walk slowly with lots of rest breaks.

Rosemary as shearling (Moreton Show)

I have had lots of experience spinning wool from these particular Jacobs. It is medium staple wool, finer than you would expect, low crimp and greyer than it when young (see picture of Rosemary aged under a year old with deep brown patches). Conventional spinning wisdom is that fleece of a shearling (ie. from first shearing) will be the loveliest. But wool from our grass fed, happy sheep seems to just get better and better. During Warwickshire Open Studios 2020 arts weeks (20th June - 5th July) we are in lockdown. You can't get to meet the sheep or visit my studio. So I plan to do a blog post every day showing the transition of fleece from these sheep to finished fabric.

There could well be distractions and diversions along the way but these sheep provide the thread that runs through my stories of creative work during the arts weeks. Follow along with my journey.