Lilac Yarn

Or a sheep of many colors.



This is Mia. Everything in the basket is Mia. That's one of the fun things about Jacob sheep. With their spots, you can combine any amount of each color and get all sorts of variety.



While most Jacobs are black and white, Mia and her brother Blizzard are a rare color called Lilac. They are brown and white...or brownish/grayish and white. I guess kind of purple-ish. I thought it might be fun to set up a lilac photo shoot.



I wish there was such a thing as smell-evision. We have lilac bushes outside two doors and you can smell them all the way on the porch. The viburnums along the side sheep paddock (the white flowers) waft through the entire yard and even into the barn in the afternoon. Seriously.




Mia comes out to eat with the oldies in the a.m. And while they would never dream of leaving the flock to explore the yard, given half a chance, Mia would probably head on into town. As I came around the corner of the house, there she was on the back porch.

I quickly sat the basket of her wool down and knew she'd sniff it. It would have been nice to try to pose her in front of one of the lilac bushes, but she'd just end up grabbing some leaves or flowers and Have To Go Back To The Barn Right Now! Which she did anyway because she ran over and topped a few strawberry plants.

Remember, there are good yard sheep and bad yard sheep. Or maybe there is just Miss Ewenice and bad yard sheep. Regardless, Mia is a bad yard sheep ;-).




Meanwhile back at the Wool House...

I used Mia's lamb fleece from last year and did a 50/50 blend, a 5/95 (almost all dark), an all white and two "core" combination (see the basket above). For one I took some dark and sandwiched it between two light strips and the other I did the same thing, but then ran the "sandwich" one pass through the drum carder.





Photography note - bright light is frequently not your friend. I like the composition of this, but yikes - notice how harsh it seems compared to the shaded pictures above it? And while filtered light sometimes creates its own set of problems...



...isn't it nice here? I love how this picture draws you in to where you feel like you are in the middle of the bush, watching the butterflies, listening to the bees and can smell the lilacs.

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We'll have a few Jacob fleeces for sale this spring. I'll have the website updated hopefully this week. Must. Put. Down. Camera. ;-)