Sheep Shearing

I got to go sheep shearing a few weeks ago, which was quite epic

Not to mention it took place at a little farm in one of the most beautiful areas of montana, with a panoramic view of the Mission Mountains

beautiful huh?

Anyways, Will the shearer does this once a year, and it becomes a big event. He invites all his friends, and anyone willing to make the drive and get their hands dirty (or oily from the lanolin). It takes him all day to shear the 90 sheep waiting patiently in the barn, all huddled close.

groups of ten sheep are wrestled away into a separate pen, where they're then wrangled one at a time. Wrangling involves separating one Ewe from the rest, and pinning her close to the gate so Will can grab her, flip her over, and shear as quick and swift as possible.

When he finishes each Ewe, someone will grab the wool, in one big heap, and fling it onto a table for the "wool pickers" to remove any vegetable matter.

From there it's brought over to a big wooden box with a sack inside. Another happy helper will then stomp on all the fleeces in the sack, to condense them and fit in as much as possible.

Last thing to do before we can call it a day is feed all the newly bald sheep. (we throw pieces of hay off the truck as we drive through the field which is why they're all following us) 

Some interesting things I learned:

even though the wool is local, it has to be shipped to china to be processed in a wool mill. Apparently there are very few wool mills still operating in the States (I think Pendleton is one of the few so props to them) and most that are still operating here are too costly and lack up to date machinery. The cheapest mills are where there's cheap labor, and that's china as well as other countries with no child labor laws and terrible wages.

sheep are really interesting creatures. They hate being separated from the herd, wranglers have to be pretty strong. Although sheep don't really bite or kick or run, they are serious deadweight and when they don't want to budge, it takes a lot of effort to move them. However, despite their initial resistant, most didn't even put up a fight once Will had a hold of them. Despite all being pregnant, hardly any made a peep, and only a scarce few kicked.

sheep are an incredibly sustainable farm animal, just think of all they give you; wool, lanolin, milk, lambs

pretty sweet deal if you ask me

and lastly, here's some shearing humor;

Shrek, New Zealand's most famous sheep who was renowned for avoiding being shorn for years. Shrek evaded the annual shearing roundups seven years by hiding in caves on his farm on the South Island. When finally found in 2004, he was clad in an astonishing 60 pounds (27 kilograms) of wool. That's about five times a typically annual shearing from Shrek's breed, the Merino sheep prized for some of the softest wool.

NEW POSTS every Sunday!..... I mean we'll see...;)

A New Take on Spinning

I know I've shared pictures and videos about my hand built spinning wheel, but I've been itching to open the studio doors and show how it came about. As an artist process is fascinating, revealing, and inspiring to me, hence I've decided to post my notes, sketches, and thought process regarding this awesome project.

I made this contraption for an assignment in my SculptureI class last spring when we were told to make something out of found objects. (Leave it to me to make that simple guideline incredibly complicated)

The idea was born from a synergy of my interests of the time;

-stuff made from bike parts

- Wool obsession combined with daydreaming about how I could make my own yarn to save money

 - eagerness to take advantage of both having a teacher and having awesome tools (saws, drills, a welder, sandblaster, etc.) 

Then there's also the practical side of me wanting to make something I'll either get use out of (functional art) or make money from (marketable art?)

My original plan was to build a traditional spinning wheel using bike parts and scraps. That later morphed into a new design using an exercise bike to spin the yarn because

                       a) I had only two and a half weeks

                       b) had never welded before

                       c) I knew absolutely nothing about how to build a spinning wheel (or how they worked)

                       d) Free cycles had an exercise bike for grabs

                       e) my professor met my ambitious idea with more skepticism than I'd hoped

above: trying to piece together the parts of a spinning wheel, and the bike parts I'd use

you can see above, that I had a hard time figuring out where to attatch the bobbin/flyer, and that the bike itself needed tuning up and parts added. I finally had a clever bike mechanic give me the idea of placing a wheel perpendicular to the front tire, so that the motion of that front tire pedaling would propel the wheel touching it, which would then turn a string attatched to the flyer, which would then turn the yarn! The best part? I can sit comfortably on the bike and have the bobbin/flyer right in front of me.

I feel like the end result is a testament to the power of google, and teamwork. I made use of my resources; people, internet, and tools to create a tangible version of my vision. I went back and forth from a yarn store to a bike shop, asking questions and drawing connections, bouncing ideas around, figuring out the engineering involved, and essentially piecing a puzzle together.

for a while I thought I'd have to make actually construct the bobbin and flyer. Thankfully Joseph's Coat (a yarn shop) was kind enough to give me a broken one I was able to fix up (found object sculpture!). In the end I only had to make the bar it sits and spins on, (you can see in the video) by welding some scrap metal together, and pipes, drilling some holes, etc. and attaching it to the handlebars. Oh and to the lower left is an insight into my crazy to-do lists. Talk about frantic. 

The final product may seem simple, but you can see from my sketches I experimented with many designs and threw out multiple ideas before finally finding the right one.

I hope I didn't make this too confusing! The details are sometimes hard to describe and explain but hopefully the pictures balanced that out.