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A Visit to Heather Ridge Farm

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 On April 2, I took at trip to Heather Ridge Farm near Potter Hollow, NY.  It was sheep shearing day!  I was anxious to return to the farm to buy more wool. I had purchased some Icelandic wool from the farm last fall.  It was the "summer coat," and Carol told me that she would be shearing the winter coat from the sheep in the spring.  The day had finally come, and I was very anxious to see what the winter coat would look like.  My goal is to mix some of the winter and summer coat into a nice yarn that I can use for my sweater project . Heather Ridge Farm has somewhere around 40 sheep, and the process was due to take several hours.  I think I stayed for two of them.  :-) The shearing process is fascinating to me.  A typical shearing of one sheep took just a couple of minutes.  The sheep got a complimentary mani/pedi prior, and then it was off to the races.  Before you know it (and before the sheep knew it), the haircut was complete-...
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What is Alma's Wheel?

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 I remember being a very young boy back in the late 60's, visiting my grandmother's farm in Vermont.  Called "Butternut Farms," because of the..wait for it..butternut trees in her backyard, it was 100 acres in the hills of Lyndonville.  It was several hours away from where we lived in New Jersey, so we didn't go there often.  But when we did, it was for several days, and it was a most peaceful time for me. I remember the wagon rides, the walks in the fields, playing in the old barns, Nanook the Siberian Huskey, the woodchuck that lived in the wood shed attached to the house, and the huge fireplace in the living room. Also in the living room, I distinctly remember her spinning wheel.  It was a classic looking wheel (one that I later learned is a Saxony style wheel), the color of...well, the color of butternut, and it sat across the room from the fireplace, just to the left the television, in front of the big window that overlooked the yard and the valley below th...
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Sweater From Scratch

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So I'm going to try a project, completely from scratch.  I barely know what I'm doing, but I'm just going to jump into this. So step one is to figure out what kind of sweater I would like to make.  After some shopping, I decided on a pattern that I purchased on Etsy.  My original idea was a cable-knit sweater -- and I did successfully do a cable-knit panel years ago -- but I like this design, and it looks like it might go a bit faster than cable-knitting. My plan is to get my hands on some raw fleece, wash it, blend it, card it, spin it, and knit it into a sweater.  I know a bit about processing raw fleece and spinning...and I "technically" know how to knit.  I know the knit stitch, the pearl stitch, and I can knit a square panel! I figure this will take me months to do, maybe a year.  If I start now, maybe I'll have something to wear next winter! I'm not very particular about the color, I just want to go for "not white."  That should be pretty e...
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