Farming in the shade

This Saturday, we will host another Open House Shearing Day . Come anytime between 9 and noon to see our Polypay sheep get their annual haircut. This is a great opportunity for families, as well as for the beginning or experienced fiber artist. Dress warmly and in old clothing, as we shear in a barn. Fiber arts demonstrations will be ongoing throughout the morning. We'll have raw, skirted fleeces for sale for an amazing price of $3/lb. (whole fleeces only, in person only, that day only). We'll also have roving and yarn from our own sheep available for purchase, as well as The Farmer's famous hand-cranked socks. Please email me if you are in Western Michigan and need our address. There's a green "email me" button in the upper right corner of the blog.

From the end of our daughter's pencil: Available (along with other drawings) in her etsy shop .

Here's an encouraging story about some fellow farmers from Michigan and the unique way the found to help the people of Haiti:

It's always fun to find that someone completely unknown to us appreciates our work. Just this morning, I sent a "No, thank you" note to a wholesaler in Brooklyn who wanted to introduce our line of socks to Japan. Who knows if it's legitimate; so much of on-line communication is not. At any rate, if you click on the button above, you'll be taken to a blog called The Creative Jar. This blogger features fun things found on etsy. Nice thing to wake up to on a Friday...

Our sheep barn is a 1970s vintage steel pole barn. Very long. For most of its life, it housed chickens. Now it provides winter shelter for sheep and storage for some of our hay. As you walk in the barn, 2/3 of it is pens of sheep--along the left side, all the way to the back. On the right 1/3, we store hay. We stack the hay on reclaimed wood skids, to keep it off the cement floor. Contact with cement floors rots hay. We stack it floor to ceiling, from the back of the barn to the front. The cats think we do it for them--to provide a nice cozy sleeping place and a perch from which to survey their world. We just let them think that. Here's a shot looking toward the front of the barn. Don't you just love how the eyes of the sheep glow when we take night photos of them? I think it's because they have different, better-night-vision eyes than we do. The sheep come inside with the first major snow. The Farmer then starts feeding hay, whittling little notches in the long row of hay...

Cleaned out the basement tonight, with the kids' help. It needed doing. I volunteered to burn the paper-waste in our burning barrel. As I loaded the barrel and lit it, I noticed a tattered shoebox of homemade paper dolls. I remembered the hours of fun our middle two daughters enjoyed with these dolls. The clothes were made from wallpaper sample books, obtained free from a local store. Who says fun has to cost something? I almost kept them, rescued from the burning, just for the memories. But I didn't.

Regrets are the shackles that keep us from living in the now.

I should get out more. There's beauty out there in the cold. I don't like cold much, and I'm always in a hurry. That's why marking the blessings in my life is good for me. Slows me down and makes me notice. Some days I have to look. Continuing on my quest to reach a thousand: 33. the relief of coming home to supper, prepared ahead of time. 35. driving on clear roads. 36. red barns. 39. finding out that a child's illness is not serious. 41. God's grace providing what we do not deserve. 43. a clean desk. Would you like to join me in counting? Click here to learn more.