Life on the learning curve continued today. Last week the topic came up at dinner about the lamb meat purchase we made. I commented that honestly I would rather knit the island lambs than eat them… MR agreed it would be a great skill to learn and good fun while we were at it..

This morning I was invited to the R’s with MB to card the wool that the R’s had retrieved from the farm barn and scoured. They took the wool and set it in a giant tub of less than hot, more than warm, water… with liquid laundry soap..  After an hour of soaking they rinsed it and then repeated the process.. The next time we think a third wash would be a good idea.. This process gets a lot of the poopages out of the wool.. (poopages is a technical term).

They dried the wool for the last two days on racks in the loft of their house.

We then teased the dry wool.. Just let me mention here at this time.. There was a lot of new vocabulary flying around.. It was hard for me to keep up.. My head was going to explode from information over load.. But I will try very hard to use the correct lingo in the description of our adventure…

Then we  fed the teased wool into the carding machine we had borrowed from the farm. At the risk of sounding like a fifteen year old valley girl… it was way cool!!!! The wool came out in these beautiful clean soft bats they call rovings…

We still have lots more to do.. Next week we will go on to the next step which is spinning the wool. MB thinks we need to take a course first…. MR thinks we can do this cause his aunt could and JR and I are game to try anything as long as  lamb poopages aren’t involved.

MB and I walked over together which was very entertaining. M and I speak completely different languages.. As my long time friends know.. I speak a language of embellishment, exaggeration, and what can seem at times to be an indiscriminate use of nouns..

MB is very literal and exact.. It often takes us several minutes of translation to confirm what we are actually talking about… but it was great fun.. M was also very kind to walk slowly with me as I stopped to take pictures along the way.. It was just too beautiful on the farm to not record for my journal…

The many shades of green were breathtaking..

So it was another day of learning and beauty on the island. I managed to procrastinate once again the final proofing of the newsletter.. I have to send it in by noon tomorrow.. I cannot put it off any longer so I will get to it now.. well after the hockey game.. then I will get to it…or after dinner… then for sure I will…..