valentines

sheep to scarf, part 1

This semester I decided to offer a class for our Monday Homeschool Class group which I've called "Sheep to Scarf". The idea is to take a fleece from a sheep all the way through the process of creating a wearable garment. I actually wound up dividing the class into two sections, as it overfilled. We're at our half-way point in the class now, and I thought it might be fun to document what we've been doing.

I haven't been able to get any action shots of the kids at work, since I'm too preoccupied actually teaching, but I figured I could post photos of our products. This first photo, of course, is what the fleece looks like before shearing, on an actual sheep!

We then took the fleece and skirted it, which means we removed manure tags (stuck-on bits of poop, and don't think the kids didn't love that!), kemp (hairy fibers that affect the quality of the fleece), second-cuts (places where the shears went over the fleece twice, a big no-no in shearing, but it does happen occasionally and those bits need to be removed by hand), and larger pieces of vegetation.

Then we washed the fleece to remove the dirt and lanolin (the grease that is naturally in wool) and let it dry -- here's our clean, dry fleece.

Then we carded it on a drum carder to remove the smaller bits of vegetation and make the wool smoother to aid in spinning a more even yarn. Our end product from carding is wool roving (that pile of white wool on top of the carder), which, when spun, will make a woolen yarn. I also showed the kids how to comb the wool with wool combs, which aligns all the fibers in the same direction to produce wool top -- when wool top is spun, it makes a worsted yarn.

Then we dyed our fleece with Kool-aid dyes. We put the roving (having been soaked first in soapy water) in pots, sprinkled powdered Kool-aid thoroughly over them, filled the pots with enough water just to barely cover the wool, then boiled them on the stove top until all the color had been absorbed out of the water (between 30 and 45 minutes, depending on the color and how much powder we'd used). In experimenting, we discovered if we wanted pink we needed to use only a very small amount of the powder, but if we wanted red, we needed to use about three times as much as any other color for a good effect.

We also made felted soaps with dyed roving as something for the kids to actually be able to take home right now. The kids had a blast getting all soapy and wet!

J is in the class and is very much enjoying it. Zoo Boy is taking my related class for younger kids, "Fun with Fiber" where we are doing a lot of the same types of projects, just simplified for the younger set.

We still need to spin our roving into yarn, ply and finish the yarn, and crochet our scarves. Plus, the kids are all coming out to our farm for a visit to take part in the actual shearing of a sheep this coming Monday, which is a holiday so there are no regular classes. So I'll post a follow-up about how the rest of the class goes.

Needless to say, I'm having a total blast working with the kids and the fiber! I've got lots of ideas for other fiber-arts classes, now that I've got a group of kids hooked on it. In the spring I'll be focusing on crocheting!

minutes old

We had another set of twins born this morning at about 9am. I photographed them at about 9:20. Their mom, "Ev", is still working on cleaning them up, so that yellow cast on the one lamb will disappear.

Introducing Jasper (the cleaner lamb on the left, who had only just stood up for the first time when I snapped this photo) and Emmett (his older brother -- by a few minutes!).



In case you're wondering how our last set of babies are doing, here's Bella...










...and Edward.

And yes, they are WAY too cute!











My own little lambs, still sick believe it or not. This upper respiratory virus has just kicked our butts. But I think I can safely say we're finally at the end of it. Zoo Boy stopped coughing at some point over the past couple of days, and although J still sounds like he's going to bring up a lung at times, he's spending more and more of the day sans cough. We're even going to try venturing out today. We're all a little sick of being locked inside.

And we're all looking forward to resuming our normal rhythms next week! Two weeks off from curriculum work is getting on all of our nerves.

just arrived!

Cuteness alert! Lambing has begun, yesterday afternoon we welcomed our first new babies of 2009:

Proud Mama, "Ugly Betty" shows off her new babies. (The chickens were excited too.)

Betty is my oldest ewe, this will most likely be the last year she is bred, so I'm excited to have gotten another nice set of twins out of her.







The little girl, "Bella".

She's a real beauty!

I don't suppose anyone is too surprised that my theme for naming lambs this year is the Twilight Saga?





The little boy, "Edward".

Isn't he just the cutest?!?!?!











This miserable beast is the father of them all. I can't even remember his name (I'm sort of pleased about that fact, actually!). He was the worst animal we've ever had on the property behavior-wise. He bent up several gates, ruined hundreds of yards of fence wire, pulled fence posts out of the ground, and crashed through his shelter (several times) to breed the ewes too early. (We really prefer lambing in March, not the dead of February.) The second he was done with his job here, we got rid of him.

But now, looking at the cute faces of his children, it seems like maybe all the trouble was worth it. He certainly was a handsome fellow, part Shetland, part North Country Cheviot, part Texel, I believe.

scenes from the sick house

Thanks, everyone, for the well-wishes. We're still mired under with this ridiculous upper respiratory virus that doesn't seem to know when to quit, but I'm pretty sure we'll pull out the other side of it eventually. In the meantime, I thought you might like to see how we spend our sick days. (Don't worry, I left out the more gruesome photos!):

Board games. Always popular with the kids. I pulled out a new one this week, a Family Pastimes game called "Snowstorm". The kids, of course, fell in love and have been playing it all week. It's designed as a cooperative game, but we've actually been playing our own competitive version where we try to snow in our opponents. What can I say, burying a family member in a snow bank has been a nice release for that pent-up angst at being cooped up indoors for too long.

Origami. While we've been trying to bury each other under snow banks on the game board, J has continued his mission to bury us under a real mountain of folded paper. He's getting closer to success all the time.



He's getting thematic about it, too. Here's a collection of "meadow creatures", as he referred to them -- a grasshopper (left), a scorpion (middle), and a turtle (right). He's currently working on turning the dining table into a prehistoric swamp....






Snuggling.

And reading.








And reading, and reading, and reading.


One of these days we'll all be able to breath again and will get back to a more active lifestyle. But for right now, we're all logging a lot of bedtime with books.

respite

Sick kids and a sick me have totally derailed us this week. As of noon today, I officially threw in the towel and declared this week a disaster area. We'll try again next week, when hopefully this little viral bug will have left the building and it's residents in peace.

Thankfully, though, I did get a 1 1/2 hour respite this morning, as I do every morning, in the name of getting the animals fed and watered and the stalls cleaned. I chose to photograph it this morning, because both the chaos in the house, and four inches of new snow outside the house, made my daily respite extra beautiful this morning. Enjoy:

cold lollipop games

I thought that it might be nice to have a record of some of Zoo Boy's Speech Therapy exercises, so here's a series of photos I took during his practice session this morning. We do Speech exercises every morning except Sundays (with both boys, just because J doesn't want to be left out, and of course wants a lollipop too!), and Zoo Boy has a formal therapy session on Tuesday afternoons with our totally rockin' SLP, Miss Sarah, who incorporates her sessions with an OT on staff to make sure Zoo Boy is grounded enough with his sensory stuff to benefit from the therapy session.

I call the therapy practice we do at home"Cold Lollipop Games", because most of the exercises involve a lollipop that is soaked in ice water (the cold provides more sensory feedback for him), and because I long ago figured out that you don't use the word "therapy" with kids if you want any cooperation from them!

So we start our session with the exercise pictured in the first photo -- tongue thrusts. Well, sort of a reverse tongue thrust. Zoo Boy relaxed his tongue, and I push it backwards towards his throat with the cold lollipop. This helps with awareness of his tongue, and sensitizing the beginning of the throat/gag area (where he is under-sensitive). I repeat each exercise five times. (In between each activity, the lollipop goes back into the ice water to get cold again while I repeat the exercises with J.)


Next comes lip rolling. I hold the lollipop under the center of his top lip, and roll to the left jaw, then start in the center again and roll to the right jaw. This helps with awareness of his lips -- much of his speech clarity problems are caused by the fact that he tends to hold his lips absolutely still, rather than rounding, pursing, or stretching them while forming his words. There are probably two reasons for this -- first, he does not have much awareness of his oral-facial muscles, combined with under sensitivity of the skin, and second, he had massive dental problems as a toddler (he was born without any enamel on his top teeth, and they rotted very rapidly, requiring major dental surgery at 2 1/2 years of age to correct -- our theory is that his teeth were so painful that he avoided putting any pressure from his lips on them, right during the time he was learning how to talk). So our entire approach is based on sensitizing him to his oral-motor structures and retraining him how to say letters with correct lip and tongue motions.

Next is a simple cheek massage exercise, on both sides of course. This is purely for sensory awareness.

This is a lip pursing exercise. He holds the lollipop in his rounded lips to a count of twenty. This works not only on awareness of the action of rounding his lips, but also is building up the facial muscles he needs to make this motion.

Tongue flips. He touches the tip of his tongue to the roof of his mouth (just behind his front teeth), then moves it along the entire roof to his throat, then back again. We taught him how to do this (initially he had no idea how) by having him follow the cold lollipop with his tongue tip as we moved it back and forth along the roof of his mouth. Before we worked on that, we held the lollipop on the outside of his lips in various places and he had to reach out with his tongue to touch it. That was VERY hard for him initially, he's come a really long way with his tongue control.

Practicing words that being with the letter "r". The goal is for him to say simple single-syllable words that begin with "r" and are followed by an "a", "ah", "eh" or "eye" sound without moving his lips at all, and touching his tongue to the roof of his mouth. This has been really slow going for us, as he's long been wanting to round his lips to say the "r" sound, which of course comes out sounding like a "w" instead. We've had to take this really, really slowly, making it simpler and simpler in order for him to have success. He's really gotten the hang of this these past couple of weeks. Next we'll add other vowel sounds after the "r", which will be harder as he'll have to change his mouth position to finish the word, then get it back into the right position for "r" for the next word.

A differentiating exercise for him -- practicing the same words, but with a "w" sound at the beginning of them, making sure he rounds his lips properly for the sound. (Even when he was rounding his lips for "r", they weren't really round, more neutral, and in the same position as he used for "w", so neither sound was quite correct.) This too is something he's made huge progress with the past couple of weeks. I think he's really starting to "get" these exercises (although he's still got a ways to go before he's naturally using it properly in conversation).

The very best part of the session, at least as far as Zoo Boy is concerned -- getting to have the lollipop when we're all done!

It's taken us a while to really get moving with his SLT program, as he was fairly resistant at the beginning. But we managed to find just the right therapy team for him (we travel over an hour to get there, but it's WELL worth it!), who understood that they needed to take it very slowly with him and build his trust first, and start sessions with a lot of sensory-rich activities before attempting any actual speech work. He ADORES his therapists and I think going to their office is the highlight of his week.