Tag Archives: CSA

As you know, our annual Shearing Party was held a couple of weeks ago. The party is always a good time, but the main purpose of it is to shear our flocks of Cormo and Colored sheep (plus a handful of Angora goats.)

Now that we have all that glorious fleece off the animals and bagged up, it can start the process of becoming yarn, which will then become wonderful knitted garments made by you.

Here’s what happens next:

On May 2nd or 3rd, we will be dropping hundreds and hundreds of pounds of fleece off with our favorite American woolen mill at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. We always try to have the flocks shorn before MDS&W because I prefer handing the fleeces off personally to the people who will be milling over putting it in a box and shipping it to them. In additional to saving us around $1000 in shipping charges, passing the fleeces directly to the people who will be processing it gives me more confidence that our order will be handled properly. There are a lot of details that must be passed to the mill and I am always more confident that they know what my expectations are when I can check all the boxes right in front of them and discuss my order personally.

After the fleece reaches the mill, it will be scoured to remove all the dirt, vegetable matter and lanolin. Believe it our not, half the weight is usually lost in the washing process! It’s always a little disappointing to get the post-wash weight, even though I know what to expect.

The clean fleeces will then take their place in the line to be combed and spun. Our white fleeces and colored fleeces are processed separately, both from each other and from all the other wool coming in from other farms and ranches. (We only want yarn made from our own fleeces, naturally.) The white wool is generally processed fairly quickly, with a turn around time of three our four months. The colored wool takes a bit longer, as the mill has to shut down the equipment and clean everything before processing colored wool, and repeat the procedure afterwards.

Once the wool has been washed, carded, spun and hanked  it is shipped back to us for dyeing and shipping out to you. As you can see, there are many steps in the process to making yarn, and for a good part of that process, everything is out of our hands. That can be really frustrating for a control freak like myself, but I’ve learned to work with people I trust and check in with them frequently.

And while we’re waiting for our yarn to return, we can distract ourselves with LAMBING SEASON! Lots and lots of lambos should start arriving in just a couple of weeks. More on this let this week.

When our 2013 CSA blankets arrived in August, and I posted that I wasn’t certain if we’d have another blanket CSA, there was an incredible demand for more! And Susan and I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if we could get folks blankets in time for holiday gift giving? And then we got to work and made it happen!

The past few days have been filled with boxes stuffed with gorgeous woven blankets. Since the blankets were coming from Canada, we had them shipped to me so that we could get them faster (and then get them out the door faster). The mill was a little bit behind their target date, but fortunately they arrived and I’ve shipped them all out, and they all should arrive before Christmas. (Although some of the further-away ones are going to make me nervous until I know that they’re safety in hand.)

Shipping headquarters became Julie’s house, since she has a bit more room than I do. She was an enormous help and without her I’d probably be crying in front of my computer or collapsed into a pile of blankets weeping for boxes to fold themselves.

If you want to be notified when our next Blanket CSA opportunity opens up, please sign up here.

Now that we’ve shorn our flock, the new Yarn and Fiber CSA Shares are available. You can get a Colored Share (that will include this year’s lamb’s fleeces!) or a Cormo Share here. Get ‘em while they last!

It was awfully strange shearing sheep yesterday without the festival atmosphere that we have grown accustomed to over the past few year. (We missed the fried chicken, too.)

By coincidence, the weekend Emily was available to shear my flock was the same weekend that I had invited a few friends in town. And of course, Erin pitched in, so we had plenty of help. All-in-all, it was a very low-key day.

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The fleece we sheared yesterday will be turned into roving and yarn for our 2013 CSA Shareholders, who have patiently watching their shares grow all year. The fleece will be shipped to the mill in Michigan this week, were it will get in line to be washed, carded and spun.

The flock has already started to work on the fleece for our 2014 Shares, so they will go on sale tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. E.S.T.

I have so many little things to catch y’all up on and I am hell bent on getting done today and off my plate. Here we go:

Our first Blanket CSA has (finally!) come to fruition! All but two or the shareholder’s blankets have been shipped (due to a color mix up that is now corrected) and we have already gotten lots of lovely replies from shareholders telling us how happy they are with their JMF blankets.

I want to thank all the Blanket CSA Shareholders for their patience- this was a new product for us and we made some mistakes. (My timeline was, well, let’s call it ambitious.) We also learned a whole lot about what to do differently next time. I’m not sure if we will do the blanket CSA again, but I am pondering it. In part because I forgot to order a blanket for myself! And after seeing them, I want one for every bed in my house.

Members of our Sock Club should start stalking their mailboxes for their first skein of lovely, hand-dyed sock yarn. It’s going out today and it is lovely. I will give you a tiny hint- it was inspired by the gloomy, wet and grey weather that we had a the farm for most of January.

Fall 2012 Yarn CSA Shareholders also have something to look forward to soon; the mill has completed our order and a couple of enormous boxes of mohair blend yarn are on their way to the farm right now! If you are a Fall 2012 Shareholder, you can expect an email in early February asking if you’ve had an address change and advising you of dyeing options.

I don’t think we will be doing the Fall CSA Shares again. The timing just works out badly for us here at the farm, and now that we have the Colored flock as well as the Cormos, it’s just too much. The Fall Shares have always had a smaller but very dedicated following, and I am very grateful for your support over the years. This was our fifth Fall Yarn CSA and it seems like a good time to draw the curtain on it.

In other news, we have moved most of our shipping from the USPS to FedEx Ground. I hated to do it, but with postal rates going up on 1/27 and the difficulties we’ve had with packages going astray this year, it was a no brainer. Smaller, more easily replaceable packages may still ship USPS from time to time.