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I arrived at my hotel at about 2:30 after a clockwork day of air travel and then wending through Seattle’s streets in an airport shuttle van. I shared the ride with a very informative woman who was arriving home from FLA and she was very good about pointing out all the sights as we traveled. One of the most breathtaking sights is the new Seattle Public Library. It is walls of glass, juxtapostioned, angled and slanted…incredible piece of achitecture. I arrived at the Mediterranean Inn, in the Queen Ann neighborhood; a hillside area with shops, bistros, theaters, and all the necessities. I found a Safeway a block away to buy a few things for nibbles and drinks, got my internet set up in my room and found the roof deck! Wow! A 360 degree view of Seattle; from the Space Needle building to Mt Rainier(you can see it faintly in the distance in the picture) to Elliot Bay. I’ll be back there for coffee in the morning! At 6PM I took the bus line from the hotel to the Ballard district for the evening opening at Earthues. They had a lovely spread of fantastic food and company planned for us. We are a group of 10, from Missouri to Montana, CA and NH! The Earthues studio is fantastic, so full of color and fabrics, artifacts from Michele’s global journeys, reference books; just a sensory explosion! I am definitely in need of some sleep and yet it is only 9:20 PM here…the sounds of the city are quite prominent and so foreign for this country girl!
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I leave Tuesday for a conference in Seattle at the Earthues studio. I am so fortunate, along with a number of others also representing Earthues in various parts of the globe, to be invited to a 4 day intensive under the tutelage of Michele Wipplinger on a wide range of topics regarding the dyes and techniques for using them. Stay tuned for entries and pictures starting in a couple of days.
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The scramble to get hay in has begun! We had so much wet weather in May and June that 1st cut wasn’t ready until the 4th of July and second cut is coming in now. Normally 1st cut in New Hampshire is Memorial Day, second cut is ready by the 4th of July. We did get 60 bales of first cut in the barn 2 weeks ago, a far cry from what we need but a start. So with the stretch of sunny days this week the farmers were baling and we were all running back and forth from field to barn! Yesterday Jack and I got 150 bales out of the field and into our barn in just about 3 hours….no great feat except it was HOT! We registered 90 degrees at 3PM with the dew point in the 70’s…sticky yuk!. Our consolation was we knew many others doing the same that day and that after we loaded this round of hay we’d be 210 bales closer to being ready for the winter feeding! Getting the hay in is almost always fun….it’s sunny(if it isn’t you are picking up mulch hay!), it’s a good workout, it’s rewarding when it’s done and with AC in the trucks the trips between field and barn are a refresher!
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Here is Trinity with her Mom, Ashley last week…the lamb darn near as tall as the ewe now, and all from the miracles of milk replacer and the shepherd’s attention! If we were to line her up against the rest of the lambs you could not tell she was the artificially raised lamb. Her strong point is she is at the ready for feed, hay, grain and also out to graze. You go girl!
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The flocks were reunited this week and are out to pasture. We let the mothers wean the lambs naturally; less stressful all the way around and quieter too! With all the rain we have had this month the grass is growing faster than they can eat it. By August I’ll be bemoaning how slowly it is recovering, but for now the sheep have full bellies! For the past few weeks they had pretty much eaten their spring pastures down to a couple of inches and there was ALOT of baaaing going on for new pastures, it was relentless at times! Sheep are definitely food driven.
