Earlier this month we went to "Heritage Farm Days" at a local farm-museum. As part of the festivities, the three sheep in the petting zoo were shorn by a county extension agent.

There was a white sheep named Mary (maybe a Dorset??), and a pair of Jacob sheep. The female was a yearling (Leah) and this was her first shearing. One of the family members (it is a family-owned & run farm-museum, this is the father of the young kids, Audy Perry) was telling everyone (mostly children) that they could take home some of the fleece/wool. I had a big handful of wool from the jacob yearling and Audy (who we know a little bit, his kids and our kids have done some stuff together and my kids have gone to "Way Back Wednesdays" at the farm the last couple of summers) chases me down and says that if I do not take ALL of the rest of the three fleeces, he is going to THROW THEM AWAY! Horrors! I say that I am not sure that I can process them, that is a lot of raw wool and I have no drum carder, etc. He insists. Your garbage or mine, he says. So, I am persuaded and he gets me a big bag and I take it all home with me.

So far I have only washed a couple of pounds of the wool, picked through most of it, and started spinning it "from the lock" without carding or combing. Those two teeny skeins were my little samples I made to see if the wool was "worth" my time processing it. Soft. A fair amount of VM still in it after I've spun it, but I guess I will wash more...FREE FLEECES, whoo hoo!