Iowa State Fair: Day One

The Iowa State Fair is, without a doubt, one of the most popular fairs in the United States. In fact, it has been rated by numerous publications as one of the best family vacation spots in the country. It was also listed in the bestselling book by Patricia Schultz, “1000 Places You Must See Before You Die.” Kelly in particular loves the State Fair. I enjoy it too, although maybe not quite as much as he does! It is truly an Iowa tradition and a midwestern legend of sorts, dating back to its first year in 1854. A movie by Rodgers and Hammerstein, "State Fair" was actually based on the Iowa State Fair. Each year, over 1 million people attend this special event, and yesterday, we were among them for the opening day.

This year is a bit different for us because it is the first year we have attended since we have acquired livestock. In fact, last year, we had just obtained our first few chickens and Nubian goats, but we still knew very little. Now, we have a far better understanding of livestock and small farms, so we had a lot more to learn this year because we knew what we wanted to see and what questions we wanted to ask of the experts showing their animals.

We started out yesterday with the Corriedale sheep show.
Our two sheep from the Animal Rescue League are of unknown breed, so we wanted to see some of the various breeds "up close and personal" in order to try to sort out their background. We're pretty sure, now, that they are not Corriedales! Those are really big sheep! Just look at the size of this ram!
The ewes are really big too! Much bigger than our girls - and these two are just yearlings!
The Corriedale is a large breed developed in New Zealand in the 1880s. They were developed from Lincoln sheep crossed with Merino sheep. Naturally hornless, they are useful for both meat and fiber. The fleece (my primary interest!) is 3.5 to 6 inches long and evenly crimped.
I love the naturally coloured sheep because the variations in their fleeces are just wonderful, and I want to start spinning right off the sheep. The judge carefully checks them all over, feeling their body and opening their fleeces at various points on their sides to see if it is consistent and even.
The sheep are also shown in pairs, and in small flocks. We were pleased to see that other people's sheep don't always behave as they are being told to, either.

After the Corriedale show, we had some time to wait for the next sheep show, so we wandered around the fair and visited the agricultural displays and other such delights. We also watched a short talk on bee keeping - something Kelly would like to try in the coming years. One of the other delights of the Iowa State Fair is the food. While there are many things that are so grease-loaded that they are quite inedible, I am very fond of the peppermint bar ice creams from Bauder's Pharmacy, which is an old fashioned pharmacy located in downtown Des Moines, with an ice cream parlour in the back. They make a wonderful peppermint ice cream which they coat with fudge sauce and then chocolate cookie crumbs. It's been written up in both Gourmet and Bon Appetit magazine as being among the best fair food items in the country. I concur!

After some munchies, it was on to the Big Ram competition. This is purely a weight-based competition, and the contestants lined up to be weighed. I couldn't get the whole line-up in one picture - they're too big!
We had seen this big boy when we'd been strolling around earlier. He was in the line up, but he wasn't the biggest. He did have the biggest horns, though.
Sometimes, the rams decided to head-butt their owners. Ouch!
Usually though, they were quite well behaved.
Some of them even looked quite gentle.
Each one left the ring to go stand on a very large scale, and returned to the ring with an announcement of his weight.
Some of them, besides being large themselves, had other large assets.
In the end, this was the reserve winner, at 416 pounds.
And the grand prize went to "Leonard" the ram, who was 432 pounds. What a big boy!
Did you think I was finished? Nope...not yet!

After that, we went to see the Rambouillet sheep competition.
The Rambouillet breed originated with some Merino sheep exported from Spain and imported into France by Louis XVI. They were improved over time by selection and probably the addition of some native French sheep bloodlines. The breed is also known as the French Merino. The original Spanish Merino breed was lost over time when the Spanish monarchy failed. They have a fine fleece with a staple length of 2.5 to 4 inches, and are prolific breeders.

Again, these are large sheep - just take a look at these ewes! Our mystery sheep are not Rambouillet.
Here is a beautiful ram who won his class.
Sometimes you could see what the sheep seemed to be thinking...."why are you making me do this again?"
Other sheep seemed to enjoy the attention and have a little cuddle with their owners.
That made me all the more happy to finally go home and have a cuddle with Miss Marshmallow. Stay tuned for Day 2 of the fair, which I will write in the next day or so.

Miss Marshmallow

Remember this cute, sweet little lamb?

Well, she's still cute and sweet, but not so little any more. That little girl who would take 2 ounces of milk at a sitting, about once every 2 hours, now takes 2 full bottles a day. They are the pop bottle size - 20 oz or so. She'd take more, but we are trying to wean her a little bit. She gets a bottle each morning and evening.

She spends much of her day outside. She's not terribly interested in the other sheep, but she will put up with them. She'd rather be with us. She loves to eat weeds....

...and help entertain the ducks and chickens...

...and eat my ornamental dogwood. Thanks Marshmallow.

"What? You mean you didn't plant this just for me?"

She comes running like the wind when I do my own personal "baaaa" impressions, so apparently I have learned to speak sheep, even if I don't know what I'm saying.

She still sleeps in the house in our bedroom, in the dog's bed, which he lets her use. We left her out with the sheep for one day and she cried pitifully the whole time and lost her voice. Seriously, she was hoarse for 2 whole days afterwards, and Kelly started calling her our baby pterodactyl because she sounded like a raspy little bird. Poor girl.

So instead, she is spoiled rotten and she jumps into the bed every morning for her cuddle time, once she can see that I'm awake. Yes, I indulge her. Really, what did you expect?

I dyed with dignity

On Sunday, we went to a wool dyeing party at the home of one of our spinning guild members. It was my first experience with dyeing wool roving, and what a fun time it was! I took some pictures of the festivities, and here they are!

Here are a whole lot of painted rovings drying on the fence!

Here are some beautiful hand-dyed yarns!

These rovings are my personal efforts at hand-painting. I was quite pleased with the way they turned out!
Kelly's painted roving is the brownish-green one between the purple and white one and the blue one.

Some folks brought their spinning wheels and did some spinning while waiting for their dyed fiber to dry.

We enjoyed a lovely lunch of smoked chicken and smoked baked beans by one of the hosts! After that we came home and hung our painted fiber (or fibre, depending on your spelling rules!) in the basement to dry. I am quite pleased with the results and can't wait to try spinning it!



An all-around good day!

Book it Forward

I surround myself with books. I lose myself in books, and I'd much rather read most of the time than watch television. I prefer to use my own imagination to bring the words on the page to life, rather than have someone else's interpretation spoon-fed to me. I read many different kinds of books. I love fiction, but I also enjoy travel writing, clever analysis (books like Freakonomics), natural history (I just read a marvelous book about hedgehogs), and a wide range of craft and farm-oriented books. Lately I have been reading books about design of animal housing, llama training, and dealing with pregnant ewes.

Books take up a lot of space. Sometimes, I go through a de-cluttering phase. I find that I have a predilection for cookbooks, which I buy because I like to read them, but then I don't use them. I find it very hard to part with cookbooks, but right now, I'm just overflowing with them. In addition, I have some fiction that I've read but which I probably won't read again.

What to do with all these books? Sometimes I donate boxes of books to charities. Sometimes, I think it might be better to give them to people who are really interested in them! So, this blog post is a "book it forward" post. I thought I'd offer some of my books to my readers, and then in turn, I'm hoping they'll offer a book to someone else, or pass along my book when they have finished with it. So, without further ado, I present to you the list of books. I will ship any of these books, free of charge, to any of my regular readers. I know who my readers are - those who comment or are in my followers list. If you ask for a book and I've never heard of you, I probably won't send it to you! I'll send them media mail, which is a cheaper (but slower) service. By the way, I have a non-smoking, "pet friendly" household, so if you are very allergic to dogs (or bottle lambs), don't ask for one!

Hope some of you might be interested in these...if you need more information on them, I have linked them to their respective Amazon pages.

Fiction! All paperbacks in excellent condition.

The Nanny Diaries - funny and light reading, now a movie!
Avoiding Prison and other Noble Vacation Goals - funny travel reading
Whiteout - a classic Ken Follett novel
Third Time Lucky - fun, light chick lit!
The Poisonwood Bible - an Oprah Book Club choice...

Cooking - hardcovers! (these are heavy and therefore I will only ship these within the continental US and Canada)
Sarah Moulton Cooks at Home
The Paris Cookbook by Patricia Wells
Jacques Pepin Celebrates (200 of his most cherished recipes!)

Cooking - smaller books!
Cooking: A Commonsense Guide
The Mushroom Feast
Riso: Undiscovered Rice Dishes of Northern Italy
Essentials: Chocolate

Read on!!

I made a bootie!

A friend of mine recently had a baby, and another friend has a baby due in less than a month. I thought, since I am now vaguely competent in crochet, that I would see if I could make something for these infants. I found a pattern for "Bev's Very Easy Booties" online, and decided that I could tackle it, seeing as it said "very easy" right in the title.

I bought some variegated green cotton yarn for these booties because I think babies might get itchy feet if I used yarn from my sheep's wool. I also thought that if this little project went well, I would have yarn that worked for either gender of baby, in case any more of my friends should have the foolish idea urge to have a child.

So, here is what I did! I began with the half-double-crochet rows. I hadn't done that stitch before and had to look it up, but I think it went OK.

Then, I did the remaining rows, which are double-crochet. You can see that I have an error here on the left bottom side where I did an extra stitch (I think) but it doesn't generally hurt the overall item.

When that's complete, you fold the bootie in half and whip stitch it with a large needle.

Ta-daaaa! Finished bootie! Seriously? I mean, this thing barely fits a walnut. Is that really going to fit a baby foot? Really? No really?!

Marshmallow tried it on but she was less than impressed.

The instructions said to run a ribbon around the top. I think that sounds silly. I mean, infants try to eat their feet and whatnot. They could easily choke on a ribbon. Besides, ribbon doesn't tend to wash well, and then you'd have to take out the ribbon and re-insert it every time. What new mother has time for such nonsense. So, should I make a single chain crochet tie that goes around the top that could be made into a bow? I presume the idea is to stop the infant from removing said bootie and likely trying to eat it or throw it to some mysterious location.

Overall, I think it went OK for my first proper crochet project. Now for the second bootie...

Garden Harvest

I haven't blogged in a week! Eeek! Sorry readers, it's been a busy time. I'll try to make up for it today with lots of pictures and garden news.

Today we did a lot of work in the garden. It has been decidedly cooler for the past few days, and this morning presented the perfect opportunity to battle our way through the jungle of weeds in our vegetable garden to see what we could find. I'm afraid it's rather gotten away from us this year and the weeds have been overwhelming. I think next year I may try more drastic measures, like landscape cloth. Mulch and occasional hoeing does not work. I avoid herbicides, so physical barriers are more attractive to me.

In spite of the weeds that want world domination, we managed to harvest our garlic. This year we grew 6 varieties: Chrysalis Purple, German Extra Hardy, Siberian, Shvelisi, Broadleaf Czech and Georgian Crystal. All of these came from the Seed Savers Exchange and grew very well. They still have those varieties for ordering for this fall, so why not give one a try?! We'll let the garlic dry for a few days and then I'll braid some of it.

This is the broadleaf Czech - it is large and has purple hints to it.
Here is the German Extra Hardy garlic. Smaller bulbs but very white!The chrysalis purple variety was not very interested in staying attached to its plant when dug, so those won't be braided. It's such a rich colour though.
I noticed that our acorn squash are progressing very well and have gained weight in the past couple of weeks!
In addition, I've got some butternut squash progressing nicely, although they are still quite small.
We also managed to hack our way through the 4 foot tall redroot pigweed and velvetleaf patches to get to our rows of potatoes. We had planted 8 varieties this year, also from the Seed Savers Exchange. Today, we dug some Yellow Finn, All Blue and Red Gold. Here is today's harvest. The Red Gold were particularly productive. We only dug half rows of the Finn and blue potatoes and will pick more later. Tonight is definitely a night for fresh new potatoes on the dinner plate!
I spent some time wandering around the flower beds and looking at the progress of things. The echinacea has done exceedingly well this year. I noticed that the bees were very busy with it today.
I do love to watch the bees. If you "biggify" the picture below, you can see the bee's proboscis coming out of its mouth to take the nectar. They are so important in our garden as pollinators for our fruits and vegetables, as well as our flowers. I try to give them lots of preferred plants to encourage them to enjoy our garden and help our crops in the process.
The daylilies are still blooming. Here's a pale peach one that caught my eye today.
One of my favorite named daylilies that I have is this one - Bela Lugosi. I'd love to spin some yarn in these colours.
I took a look at the apple tree - here you can see the ducks hopefully watching for apples to fall into their path. I think they've got a while to wait.
The Stanley plum is also showing colour on its fruits now. That plum was planted last year, so this is the first year to fruit. It has about 8 plums on it, which isn't much, but it's nonetheless exciting for me!
One of my favorite clematis vines is "Avant-garde" and it is a later flowering one, so right now it is just covered in blooms. The blooms are smaller than many varieties but so pretty and there are so many of them. I need a bigger trellis for this one!
Finally, I have also been busy with spinning this week as usual. I spun a wool-soy silk-sparkle blend in rich gold, navy and turquoise tones.
I learned to Navajo ply last night at my spinning guild meeting last night. That is a plying method that allows one to keep sections of colour together in the final plied yarn. I was a bit slow at learning this technique, but it came out quite well in the end. I had deliberately spun this into a thick-and-thin style yarn to try for interesting texture in the final product.
I'm really quite pleased with how it worked out, although it's only about 80 yards, so I'm not sure how I'll use it. Maybe for trim on something in a solid colour. Or maybe I'll save it and sell it in the Etsy shop that I eventually plan to open. In any case, it's finished, and so is this blog post!