PAPA LEARNS HOW TO SHEAR SHEEP

I figured now was as good of a time as any...

Along with having wool sheep comes the task of shearing the sheep. This can be a profitable hobby if you sell the wool or a great chance to make your own yarn if you spin, but either way it has to get done. Although I have never done anything like this before, I figured that I might as well learn and figure it out.

HERE WE GO!

A bit ago Hive account@mama-pepper picked up some cordless clippers that we thought could work for shearing sheep. A lot of people hire this job out and professional electric sheep shears can cost a bit depending on which variety you go with, so I figured I'd make sure that we were at least up for the job before we invested too much in it. For starters, I selected our one year old ram "Rico."

I think that enjoying animals helps in the process, since I do not find it to be a difficult waste of time. Rico was pretty cooperative and the the clippers seemed to do a good job. With the hotter summer months approaching we wanted to get this thick wool off our sheep first, but we did not want to shear them too soon and leave them out in the cold. With the recent arrival of a few lambs that don't really have a lot of wool, we figured if they could handle it, then these larger ones probably could too.

I had been wondering about the darker color of the spots on the lambs compared to the lighter colored dark spots on the older sheep. This photo shows that the darker wool does grow out darker, but eventually gets bleached by the sun and begins to look lighter brown instead of almost black. I figured that we would eventually solve this mystery and sure enough we did.

Just for fun we decided to leave a few longer sections of wool and braid them. We will see if we let Rico keep them but for now they seem to be doing fine. By placing the braids right along the color transition they look even more interesting.

Here is a close up of the braids so that you can get a better look at them. He kind of reminds me of those guys with the braided mullets now, but it is what it is.

Here you can see the wool being sheared off of one of our ewes in a big section. She too has the darker wool underneath the sunbleached stuff. She was a little less cooperative, but we still made it work.

While we did not shear the whole wool in one big section, Red-Pepper shows off a big bunch of it anyway. We met a lady last year who offered to teach the girls how to spin, so we are excited for that possibility. A few of us can already knit and/or crochet, so spinning our own wool yarn could work out pretty well.

This ewe does not normally have a mane, but when we sheared her neck and rolled back the wool, it looked pretty interesting so Pinkie-Pepper wanted to take a photo. At this point we've got two sheared already, and twelve more to go! Hopefully it goes well, but we are learning!