Field Days

The state of Vermont is made up of regional counties of which I live in Lamoille County.  Morrisville is the center of the county, our county court is in Hyde Park and our county fair grounds are in Johnson.   Lamoille County Field Days are held up at the fair grounds and I am heading up there this morning to hang out with 4 of my sheep for the day and to answer a ton of questions about spinning and wool.

There is no money to be made there for me in the short term.  This is a service I do for the farming community and to the sheep community. I have listed sheep for sale, but my buyers are most likely not to be found at this fair.   Larger sheep events, like Fryeburg Fair, Rhinebeck and the Big E are were serious buyers will be.  But one never knows, so I brought up the for sale ones anyhow.

It has been raining a ton lately. Really raining, soaking rain, flood type rain.  The sheep are a mess.   I brought them up on Thursday and they were drenched from the rain the day and night before.  Impossible to block out while wet and a white sheep looks gray. It will take a couple of days for the sheep to dry out.  They are soggy wet wool beasts.

Blocking out is trimming the wool of the sheep to make the sheep look more manicured and uniform.  Blocking is done for showing sheep and it takes a bit of practice for the sheep to get used to it as well as for getting good at it as an art.   Field days is a good event to practice, no pressure for showing and it is a part of raising breeding stock that folks are interested in.

Brining lambs to events like this is always popular.  Folks like lambs.  Lambs do not always like to be at a fair or show.  Generally the first time they are away from their mothers and it is loud and scary.   This is also good practice.  Putting sheep on leads and walking them about is good practice.  A sheep that is new to lead is generally one that will not win in a show ring.   Folks are more likely to purchase a sheep that is calm on lead.

The down side to taking sheep off the farm is the exposure to animal disease.  My sheep are the only sheep at Field days this year.  There are a couple of goats, two llamas, two alpacas, horses, ox, and cows.  There are also a couple of chickens, ducks and rabbits.   But generally field days has more tractors then animals.  More rides then farm displays.  There is the arm wrestling competition, the ox and horse pulls, the pan toss and the maple creamy barn.   4-H has a huge dairy cow show, but no sheep shows.  Very little risk of exposure to other sheep diseases like pink eye, foot rot or OPP.

This is an opportunity for folks to see a Merino sheep and to see the yarn and products that can be made from the wool.   I sit with my spinning wheel and English combs and work the fiber next to the sheep.  I amazes me that folks often ask what I am spinning,  they simply do not connect the sheep to the wool.  I am often asked ” what are you weaving”.    Some folks are will stay and chat for hours and are like little sponges asking all sorts of questions, but the majority of folks see the activity as some quaint old fashioned craft and dismiss it.

I enjoy doing this because it is like sowing seeds of wildflowers in a field.  You never know who will come and see you spin or see your sheep and have a piece of their life changed a bit.  I have been demonstrating for nearly 20 years and have had folks come up to me with a story of how they saw me demonstrate, or saw my sheep and they then began their own journey with sheep or fiber.   I love it when an older person comes and watches me and then tells me of a memory they have of their grandmother spinning, or carding or of raising sheep.  Then they often tell me of how they had forgotten that until what I was doing brought the memory back, like a flower blossoming in a field.

Yesterday there were a ton of kids at Field Days.  Today being Saturday, I am expecting much the same, but more folks.  Sunday, the last day, will be less of crowd.   Three days, then we all settle back to our routines.