Dear Husband, I've just bought a sheep

This was a conversation I had back in January of this year.  To be precise I'd 'adopted' a sheep, and to the relief of Dear Husband the sheep lives in Sweden so won't be coming to stay for a city holiday.  The response was fairly mild (he's used to stange things entering our lives via me by now) so encouraged, I adopted a 2nd sheep.  Yes, before you ask, we're still married and talking to each other.

It all started on Ravelry - someone posted in Blacker & Beyond that a flock of 70 sheep, including a number of rare Spelsau sheep, was in Sweden in Police custody awaiting slaughter having been neglected and underfed by their previous owner.  Some of the sheep had originally belonged to Renee Darley.  She posted about their plight on Ravelry and people responded.  Renee lives in a remote part of Sweden with enough land for the sheep and the experience to shepherd a flock of this size - all she had to do was deal with the Police and transport them 700 miles.  After which she had to house them during the Swedish winter, feed them and return them to good health.

The whole story of the flock and the rescue and fundraising is best read on Ravelry in the Sponsor a Spelsau Sheep group and the Longbacken group.  The great news is that the flock has now been rescued and enough money was raised to cover this.

This photograph shows some of the sheep when they first arrived at Longbacken - yes, some of them are very thin, but all survived the journey.

So, back to 'my' sheep.  It seemed obvious that they should become Blacker & Beyond group mascots.  This immediately gave us the name for the first sheep who is a rather magnificent 3 year old black ram.  He's 3/4 Jacob and 1/4 Wensleydale and has the 4 horns found in some Jacob sheep.  He just had to be called Blacker.  This is a photograph of him taken after he'd eaten his way through a mountain of hay.

Some of the sheep in the flock are a mixture of breeds, but having looked at a few of the north European breeds of sheep in the B&B Sheep of the Week I was very keen to adopt a Spelsau as well and Renee found me an absolute beauty.  She's a Spelsau gimmer and after a lot of thought and consulting lists of Nordic girls names we chose Dagrún.  The D and the R in the name aren't a coincidence.  We wanted to link her name to Deb Robson because the whole Blacker & Beyond group was started during a workshop Deb led in the UK last year.  The participants came from 3 different continents and we wanted to continue sharing our enthusiasm for breed-specific yarns and fibres and sheep on Ravelry.

So this is the beautiful Dagrún.

It doesn't stop there.  If Dear Husband had managed to remain calm while I adopted 2 sheep, he was bound to notice if my fleece/fluff stash grew with Blacker and Dagrún's fleeces.  Plus I wanted to find a way the group could share the fleece from our mascots.  That's where the link with p/hop comes in.  P/hop stands for 'pennies per hour of pleasure' and is a fundraiser for Médecins Sans Frontières.  So if you enjoy knitting something, especially if you use one of their donated patterns, then you make a donation to reflect this.  An international charity for an international group.

So the fleece from Blacker & Dagrún will be going round the world to group members who want to spin it or felt it and make a donation to p/hop.  The quality of this year's fleece is obviously going to reflect the ordeal the sheep have been through, but we're looking forward to next year when the sheep will all have settled in and be in tip top condition under Renee's experienced care.

So we now have this on our group front page:

There is of course more.  The flock had a number of rams in it and although it was thought that most of the ewes were in too poor a condition to have carried lambs they defied their ordeal and started giving birth - mostly to little boys!  An alarming number of lambs came out looking like their father - Blacker.  It is now a running joke in the Save A Spelsau Sheep group.  He has a lot of good qualities that Renee would like to pass on as she improves and develops her Spelsau and spinners' flock, but he won't be allowed the same freedom this coming autumn as he had the last.

The Spelsau ewes seemed to lamb later than the other breeds and I think we all thought Dagrún was too young, but she surprised everyone by giving birth to a little gimmer (female) lamb.  The lamb has been adopted by another member of the B&B group and we're just waiting to hear her name.  She is as beautiful, if not more so, than her mother and I'm delighted to say that this time Blacker is not the father!

 More photos of the B&B trio can be found in this thread on Ravelry and anyone who enjoys spinning and fresh air in Sweden should have a look at Renee's website and see what she has on offer.

Handspinning Rare Wools DVD by Deb Robson - Not just for spinners!

Little packages from America are always exciting, and the wait for the last one seemed much longer than usual since I'd pre-ordered it earlier in the year.  There is a discussion thread about it in Blacker & Beyond on Ravelry (Ravelry members only can use this link, but it is free to join Ravelry.com)

I've been watching some of the chapters again and, seeing the level of interest from another member of the household, I thought I would post my thoughts about the dvd here as well.

To use Deb’s own closing word - MAGIC

A quote I will remember and use when talking to people about why I get so excited about the enormous variety in wool from different breeds:
“Like telling a woodworker they can only work with pine”.

Right, I shall put my reviewer hat on as per a request from a friend, and for anyone else who might be interested. These are of course my personal opinions!

Photography is superb with one tiny exception that I’ll mention later. I really liked the studio set up - calming and quiet on the eye but nice images of sheep in the back that I enjoyed but weren’t distracting. I want one of those vertical basket supports!

Sound quality was good, gentle music between the sections feel appropriate in nature to me.

DVD menu was fine - you get the option to choose ‘chapters’. For someone who was wanting to get straight to the chapter for a particular breed, you would need to know which ‘class’ that breed fell into.

If you put the dvd into a computer you can download a very informative pdf with a list of every breed covered in the dvd and information about the classification of every breed regarding ‘rare’ status from RBST and American Livestock Breeds Conservancy - it was very helpful to be able to see that information from the 2 organisations on one table.

Looking through Deb’s fleece preparation equipment and supplies, along with her talking about why she uses what she does, was fascinating and I learnt a great deal.

The first chapter of dvd 1 - what is a breed, what makes it rare, and why should we care? - was extremely informative, and Deb really does manage to come across ‘on film’ with the same passion and enthusiasm that I’ve experienced listening to her in person. Absolutely packed full of interesting facts and at times, yes, I did get emotional. The future existence of some of these breeds is not guaranteed.

The way the different breeds were grouped seemed to me to be logical and sensible.

The close up filming was good and you could clearly see what Deb was referring to in a fibre or yarn, but as we all know it is difficult to show fine detail in very dark colours. When one ‘black’ yarn was displayed on a mid grey surface that didn’t help. Although I could manage to see everything, I felt I was having to make a conscious effort to do so. All the subsequent very dark fleeces and yarns were on a lighter brown woven mat and that really improved the ease of viewing them.

I learnt a vast amount about both the breeds and their wool, and how to prepare and spin these very different fibres.

There was however also a great deal of information for knitters, weavers and crocheters and I don’t think the title of the dvd gets this across. I suspect the pragmatic need for a short title may have played a part in this. I wonder also if the spinners involved with the production of this dvd perhaps didn’t realise that non-spinners would find a ‘spinning’ dvd interesting and useful, even when it has such a lot of information about the breeds and fibres.

Many who don’t spin would still want to watch a discussion about the spinning qualities of wool from different breeds, and this will enable them to evaluate breed specific commercial yarns better and could be valuable to them in their yarn purchases. As someone who has only been spinning for a few months but was knitting with breed specific commercial yarns before then I would definitely have found this dvd extremely useful and interesting when I wasn’t a spinner. Deb does also show samples of commercially spun yarns from some of the breeds and discusses them, so I would have no hesitation in recommending this dvd to non-spinners.

I’m very pleased I own the dvd because there was so much information there that I've already found myself going back to watch individual chapters again.  It was a very enjoyable 3hrs  watching from start to finish, and I’m very pleased I did that, but there was too much to take in fully during that one session. This isn’t just a ‘watch once’ experience - this is a dvd that will be an invaluable, ongoing resource for me.

So, would I sit there in real life with knitting, spinning and sheep loving friends and advise them to buy it - you bet! ☺

How to get hold of your own copy:

DVD  can be purchased from Interweave - there is also a preview on this link.  For those outside America, my experience of ordering from Interweaves is that if they have an item in stock then it comes across the Atlantic quite quickly.

Download  is a much quicker way to get it if outside America.

While waiting for the dvd to be released I found it very interesting and encouraging to read Deb's post on her blog

A friend has also blogged about her experience of watching this dvd and you can read her thoughts here

As if all this weren't enough to get lovers of sheep breeds excited, we do of course have the release of "The Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook: More than 200 Fibers, from Animal to Spun Yarn" written by Deb and Carol Ekarius, in a few months time.