Mrs Sheep's Easter Lamb

Our last Lincoln Longwool lamb of the year was born this morning, his mother is affectionately known as Mrs Sheep, she is large, pretty & always the one to watch when herding as she'll be going the other way! Our sheep all have Pedigree names & birth certificates & when we bought our first sheep we had an Eve & Eva, so Eva became Mrs Sheep. Our new lamb is just under a month later than Imogen who we expected to be last. All our lambs & their mothers are out in the fields now except Goldie & Imogen, Daphne, Inaya & her brother who have been keeping Mrs Sheep company.

Our Suffolk cross mums are now in their shed awaiting the arrival of their lambs who are due from Thursday onwards, busy couple of weeks I think.

My 3rd Designer

My third designer is Siobhan from www.stitchology.co.uk. Last year we decided that we would like to have something a little different & I found Siobhan's gorgeous gloves. They are so different, quite holey but of course being alpaca amazingly warm. I have 2 pairs, 1 in Skylark of course & 1 in Logan who is black, wore the Logan ones to most of my events last year, when everyone else was complaining of cold hands I was warm. We decided to knit along & a short version, the long ones are the ones above, both sizes come in Logan, Lana, Kasper & Bond but we can of course knit them in any of the colours.

We also have a lovely shrug from Siobhan which is so light & pretty to wear & of course warm.

I have managed to get a place in the Etsy Showcase today & my featured items are the shrug above in Kasper & Lana & gloves in Logan.

My Designers part 2

Here's a little about my second designer Jackie Erickson-Schweitzer or Jackie E-S as she is known. Last summer we decided to branch out from our usual dk to some beautiful thin 2ply wool. We picked 2 fleeces Leo who is light fawn and Bliss who is black for this process. Then with ideas of lovely lacy scarves, all we needed were some gorgeous patterns & after scouring the internet we found www.heartstringsfibrearts.com & Jackie E-S. Her patterns are beautiful just what we were looking for & we have knitted Riverene & Reversible Lace Ladder in Leo & Riverene in Bliss, we will have to wait for a photo of the Bliss scarf as it's in the next photo shoot in 2 weeks time.

Stamford High School Craft & Gift Fair

Off to Stamford tomorrow for their Craft & Gift Fair, hoping the rain is going to stop. Really looking forward to it.

My Designers

I have realised that I have not blogged about my designers & seeing as this year I have 3 more thought it about time I did.

The first designer I approached when we set out on turning our beautiful yarn into scarves was Joanne Seiff. This amazingly was just 2 years ago. I saw her Boa scarf & loved it so much asked if we could knit them with her permission. This was granted & we have knitted them in every colour, my favourite is Skylark as she is my first alpaca, I wear this to every event & it was lovely & warm in the snowy weather we have had this year. Joanne has since had 2 books published Fibre Gathering & Knit Green, I have a copy of both of course.

Isla

This is Isla, she was the tiny triplet, the third out, first unfortunately didn't make it out alive, second Isla's brother was twice her size & then little Isla. She was ok to start with until her mother Ellie developed mastitis, her big brother is doing well but Isla began to look at little thin so we started to bottle feed her last week. It has taken all week but now when we go into the shed & hold up the bottle she comes running instead of us running round & round the shed trying to catch her! She even came up to Martin today looking for her bottle when he went in to fill up the trough with creep feed.

Our new additions

We have been to Melton Market today & bought some more sheep! Not Lincoln Longwools this time. We have bought 36 'in lamb sheep' due to give birth after 8th April. Thought we had finished lambing for this year but now we have more lambs to look forward to & probably more sleepless nights! Here is a photo of them all eating their way around their new field.