The Spring Shearing Day Celebration will be April 19th

Hooray! We have a date. Finally we have gotten the okay from our amazing and talented shearer, Jeff Traver, and from the MV Ag Society. I apologize for taking so long to finalize the date for this- getting everybody to commit to a date was like trying to keep kittens in a box.
Now we can get to work on the details and there will be gazillions of them. We are inviting all of the other sheep and goat farms on the Island to participate, so there will be a great selection of handspun yarns for you to buy if you are interested. I am also putting together a schedule of classes- nothing super formal, just things you can drop in on. I have already spoken to Rebecca Gilbert about doing a dyeing class and I believe their will be someone doing rug hooking as well, something I know nothing about but would love to learn.
The Ag Society fair grounds are such an amazing place to hold our Shearing Day. The Ag Fair, held there every August is an important Vineyard tradition and so much fun. It's very innocent and wholesome without being at all kitchy. It is absolutely my favorite Vineyard event of the year.
Until now, of course.
Pat and I go to the Sheep and Wool Show in Rhinebeck every year because a) it's near our house in New York b) our friend Sara is the president of the Dutchess County Sheep and Wool Growers Association that puts the show on and c) we run the Angora goat show. Pat is the M.C. and I tell everybody where to stand. We love helping out at the show and we almost always buy some sheep equipment from the vendors that we only see once a year, and we love seeing and sometimes buying animals there. But, otherwise, I find the whole festival overwhelming. There are sooooo many vendors selling beautiful yarn and roving and sooooo many people in line to buy beautiful yarn and roving. It's like the mall just before Christmas. I just can't focus.
I'm hoping we can make Shearing Day into a small fiber festival with the feel of our Ag Fair.
If you can find a cheap place ticket to Boston for that weekend- BUY IT! I can't wait to meet everybody.
In other news, my camera broke today. Well, not the camera exactly, the lens. I am really bummed out about it, first, because I like to take lots of pictures during kidding and the timing just couldn't be worse, but also because the lens broke in the exact same way in September. It took two months to get it back from Nikon last time.
I love my camera (Nikon D40) but the service is terrible. Beyond terrible actually.
I ordered a new, longer lens from Amazon that will be here on Tuesday but in the meantime I am without a digital camera. I may shoot some film if we have any new kids this weekend but I won't be able to get it developed and digitized until next week anyway.
The three kids, Thyme, Sage and Chive are doing beautifully! Sage and his Mom (Formerly known as 15, now named Maria Von Trapp) were released from their kidding pen today. I decided to keep Chive in for another 24 for hours. She is doing much better, she has lots of energy and is eating well, but she is still a little weaker than the others and I want to be sure she will be able to find her Mama (formerly #8, now Fran Fine) when they join the herd.

Isn't she a beauty? The orange band around her neck is something we are trying for the first time this year. When the kids come out of the kidding pens they tend to sleep together in a little pile of goats. Its absolutely adorable but, because they get their scent all over each other, occasionally their moms loose track of whose kid is whose. It can lead to two nannies fighting over a kid or a kid being abandoned. This hasn't happened to us, but you hear stories and we wanted to avoid it. (Pretty much everything that can go wrong with sheep and goats has happened to us; I always assume that the rest will soon.)
The neck bands are great, because you can write the kid's name and mom's number on them and it's easy to tell from a distance who you are looking at. I decided to make it even easier by putting orange tags on the doelings and green on the bucklings.