Dear Curiosity Journal,
The shearing of Beauty, our one black sheep, happened to fall on Easter Sunday, and I sense there is some synchronicity there, some metaphysical metaphor playing out. She was the last of the flock to be sheared, giving us a good fight, but coming out looking gorgeous. Beauty has all of the colors, brown on the outside, black underneath, silver on top, and some random cloudy patches of white. When she was born, she was all dark black, then grew out brown, so this was a very revealing first shearing, discovering her true spectrum of colors. We also noticed that she has two dark spots where her horns would be, identical to her twin sister, which is adorable. All together, we got 55.5 lbs. of wool from 4 ewes and 2 yearlings (of course, some of that is burdock, hay, manure tags, and other debris). However small, it feels weighty to me. While our first crop of wool serves the purpose of insulating part of our sauna, our second crop is the first we will take to Ewetopia Fiber Mill to be processed into fleece nuggets for gardening. Although I didn’t succeed in producing a fiber worthy wool crop, the woolets will be a useful product which I look forward to experimenting with. I also learned my lesson about burdocks the hard way, the unforgettable way, and am moving forward managing the fiber crop with more care, using coats.
~Joy
