Hello folks, excuse the silence about these parts, I've had computer trouble which I'm hoping is sorted out now. Life has been busy with little ones and woolly ones and feathered ones and hairy ones, but the BIG NEWS round here is we decided to send our fleeces off to be spun into yarn!

Myself and the wonderful Judit from Harmony Farm have combined our fleeces to give us enough to spin two batches of yarn. Our sheep are the daughters and grandchildren of her lovely Shetland ladies so they all have very similar fleeces. We have been carefully sorting through them all and picking out only the very finest fleeces to spin.

We have sent the wool to the very patient and helpful Diarmuid of STwist Yarns (I think I must have sent him a hundred emails already!) who is washing the wool in Tipperary as I type, and getting it all ready to be sent off to be carded and spun.

Here are the sheep, ready to head off to be shorn early in the summer. Paul is still wearing his sheep cover.

The lovely thing about this project has been its small scale and the familiarity we have with our animals. When sending the fleece off I took careful notes on whose fleeces were sent so we will have a list of all the sheep in each finished yarn.

There will be a white yarn and a grey yarn.

It was a surprise to me to realise that we didn't have enough dark fleece for an (almost) black yarn. I hadn't realised quite how grey our ladies had become! But hopefully we will have enough next year to replicate the picture below in knitting!

But for now, the anticipation is building! I still can't quite believe it! We are going to have YARN!!!!!!!