A quick good morning!
Looks like we will have decent weather for this coming Sunday so I am feeling much more confident we will make it to the Dupont FreshFarm market this Sunday.

And we are looking forward to the following weekend: Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival! Hope you have it on your calendar and I am hoping for dry weather! More next week, but add a note to find N26 and come see us.

Goat kid name update:

In the foreground of both photos with the black legs: Tina Modatti, a black and white photographer who also was an actress in early movies. I never knew about Tina Modatti. Tina the kid is the ringleader, all my photos seem to have her in front and the first to jump. In the middle of the second photo with the black chest is Dora Carrington, another artist I didn’t know. She was a painter and hung out with The Bloomsbury Group. Last is Dube, he is standing on the right in the second photo. We have had a goat named Jean (Dubuffet) before, but he just seems like a Dubbie…and we gave in. Thank you everyone for your suggestions. We will have to save them for future years too and I loved learning so many new artists.

signing off with a smile from Pearl,
G

Good Morning (more…)

(more…)

Good Morning!
Boy is it Spring: new colors in the dye pots, a personal (aspiration) push for, or at, spring cleaning, mowers breaking, the garden knee high in weeds…(a few beds are cleaned up and planted thanks to Joan), my desk is getting a bit deep in paper, etc. Basically…start early, go, go, go and stop in the evening because you just must…not because you’ve really made progress. This is my problem, and I do know it’s an attitude issue. The sheep are so much more advanced. They take everything in stride and just handle it. Including loss.

Tomorrow, says my calendar, is the first possible lambing here at Solitude. But yesterday I rounded the garage heading to the barn to do chores and I knew in two steps that something was up. The sheep were just looking at me telegraphing news. Sure enough, I see two white lambs up and standing with Oklahoma who looks calm. Cool! I just turned around to call Sue (I’ll be late) and go fetch the lamb “stuff” (it was on my list to get all that together yesterday). So, I get back out there in a few minutes and Okla has moved over under a tree about 30 feet away from where I first saw her. I get a picture and think one of the lambs was exhausted by the effort and is laying down.

But I go over…and the lamb is obviously dead, in fact, stiff. I know I saw two up and moving and I’m sure my eyebrows knitted together trying to figure this out. How could it be? Well, I look back over where I first saw them, and sure enough, there is the other lamb. Okla had triplets. I try not to feel bad. This is nature. I wonder if I had done a 3 am check and could have assisted with the birth, would the lamb have lived? I don’t know. Maybe, but I didn’t. So once she had showed me, she let it go and concentrated on her two boys. Here they are, shortly after settled in to a clean pen (called a “jug”) to relax for a day or two.

I’ve posted more photos of the lambs including their evening out in the pasture on another young thing…Solitude Wool has a Facebook page. There is a link on our homepage, and I probably should be able to put one in here, but it is beyond my current skills…just look for Solitude Wool. Hope you “like” us!

What else is up? Sue! up in a wool bag:

Sue is stomping in Montadale fleece that was sheared a month or two ago. We got a lot more than our usual haul, and this fleece will be heading north for scouring. We will see how this works. We are pretty excited about this beautiful soft wool. Thinking about what kind of yarn we want to make (oh boy!). And then we got back a box of Montadale yarn from the mill that I had forgotten about, a small batch of Montadale that we had saved up fleece before we met the new farm. This yarn will be the follow up yarn to our Shropshire baby yarn. It feels pretty great. Sorry you don’t get to see it yet, but look for Montadale pretty soon (Maryland Sheep and Wool?)

Last for today…Sunday we will be at the Dupont FreshFarm market in DC. We are planning to bring: Alpaca/Merino, Border Leicester sport weight (nature dyed), Border Leicester aran weight, Icelandic (nature dyed), Leicester Longwool/Border Leicester (nature dyed), Romney, Shropshire baby, Suffolk/Dorset sock yarn including yoga sock kits, Targhee 3-ply, roving, 4 white Romney sheep pelts (all I will have this year) and honey.

Gotta get going, I’m behind already!
Remember Sunday the market opens at 8:30am for the regular season,
Gretchen

Happy New Year!
Wow. Feeling like I’ve gone from zero to 60 miles and hour in 6 seconds. What happened to that Holiday suspension of time? I know this happens every year, but it is still a shock. How did I get so behind when I thought I was getting ahead? So, once again, this is a rush email. I’ll do it in bullet points:

• We are going to the FreshFarm market at Dupont (in Washington DC) this Sunday. Remember it is now winter hours: 10am to 1pm and we will be on the other side of the street from where we have been (which is really nice for us to get the sun and to be able to park next to the stand). We will take these yarns: Alpaca-Merino lace weight, Border Leicester bulky (almost sold out and it is really nice!), the Corriedale bulky, the Leicester Longwool and Border Leicester nature dyed yarn, the Shropshire baby yarn, the Suffolk-Dorset boot sock yarn (really nice for sweaters, kids knits, shawls etc and socks too), the Tunis-Alpaca and ready to spin or felt roving.

• The following weekend we will be at Vogue Knitting Live in NYC at the Hilton Hotel in midtown Manhattan. Holy smokes! We aren’t quite as worked up as last year, but almost. We are going to have a double booth and lights (I think…) so hope to have room for people to actually get into the booth this year. We were so excited to see some friendly DC Solitude customers last year! We hope lots of folks will come. I don’t know what classes might still be open, but just coming to the marketplace is really interesting, there are very Vogue fashion shows (two different runways) and demos, yarn tastings, celebrity book signings…and man the knitting celebs are so there! Kaffe Fasset, Clara Parkes, Nancy Marchant, Ysolda to drop names of people I’m looking out for. So if you are interested in dropping in to the marketplace, you can purchase tickets online (and the lines last year were daunting, so this is a really good idea) and get a free gift certificate. I’ll send an email next week with our line up of yarn and other particulars.

• Lamb update from RedGate…they are growing up really too fast I think. Here are the photos Sue just sent me of the little girls

snuggling sisters

• and look what we got for Christmas, a special purple birdhouse…with a leaping goat. We have it hung where we can see it from the livingroom. Just waiting for spring to see who will move into this fine place.

Hope you can come to the market Sunday, if there is something we don’t have on our list to bring that you would like, drop me an email by Friday morning and we will pack it in: f-fsolitude@mindspring.com
The weather forecast is for warmer temps (thank goodness!) but possible showers. Right now I’d say it is a 90% chance of us coming, but if the rain is bad we will stay home. Check the web site by 7am if you want to know for sure. I will post if we are not coming, otherwise, assume we will be there.
Thanks,
Gretchen

Greetings!!!
The last day of November. The gift of warm weather we have is not to be wasted, and I’m trying to dye as much yarn as possible. I can make way better colors when my fingers aren’t frozen and it isn’t so hard to get the pots hot. I think I have some beautiful new colors! Sue is helping me be way more productive by taking the dyed yarn home to her farm to rinse and dry. I finally had the black walnut dye pot ready. There have been three large muck buckets filled with black walnuts soaking for maybe two months? three? I used just one of them and ohhhh, the first batch came out the most beautiful deep, dark bittersweet chocolate. The other two tubs I decanted and am saving for later. So I wish I had a photo for you, but alas…not yet. Next week I will show new yarn colors.

However, we will bring some of the new colors with us this weekend. Two markets! Saturday we have our special appearance at the Leesburg Farmers Market. We are looking forward to seeing our Loudoun neighbors and hope we can attract some of the Loudoun Needleworkers, Blue Ridge Spinners and Weavers, Waterford Weavers and Loudoun Knitters to come see the new yarns and visit with us (Guild members get a 10% discount).

Sunday we will be (as usual) at the Dupont FreshFarm Market.

Here is what we are bringing this weekend:
Alpaca/Merino lace weight yarn
The Border Leicester Sport weight nature dyed yarn (the most beautiful black walnut is this one!)
Corriedale/Corrie cross yarn
Targhee 3-ply
Border Leicester Bulky
and a Leesburg favorite: the odds and ends bins
I’m also bringing some special jars of honey with comb inside. It would make a special holiday present for just about anyone.

okay, so I spent all my time today dyeing yarn, so I’m really rushed for this email. Sorry. Next week I’ll do better, but here are some photos of Sue’s new Karakul lambs to make up. First…Mr. Brownie:

and another set of twins, way to go Sue!

Howdy!
So many good things are happening for us! First, Sue has lambs! The first two were born this week:

For those of you not properly introduced: meet Nell, a proud Karakul ewe from Sue Bundy’s RedGate farm, and her two new lambs Margaret and Madelyn. Karakuls have many desirable characteristics and one of them is they will breed “out of season” meaning just about any time of year they are allowed to. Sue loves fall lambing. If she doesn’t show up at market with me on Sunday you can guess that she needed to stay home for a bit of midwifery (my fingers are crossed that everybody decides to wait until next week…).

The other crazy lucky thing for us is not one, not two, but three bits of press for Solitude this month:
1. Piecework magazine’s November issue is all about wool. Deb Robson, author of (the Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook) wrote an article about preserving rare breeds of sheep, focusing on four breeds. One of them is the American Tunis and there is a project for a hat to knit…using Solitude Wool Tunis! So cool.
I still haven’t seen the issue, but I’ve ordered it… You can download the chart for the hat designed by Kristi Schueler at the link above.

2. The Knitter’s Life List by Gwen Steege. Check out the cool sweepstakes at the link. This book came out in September, but I’ve just gotten over the shock of it now. I’m one of the people to meet on your knitting life list. You all can check off that one! It is a really nice write up about us and our yarns and another great photo of one of Sue’s Karakul lambs from a couple years ago.

and 3. Knit Local, Celebrating America’s Homegrown Yarns by Tanis Gray. Solitude Wool is one of 28 yarn companies in this book. There is information about us and photos of my Romney sheep (they are all full of themselves now). But the best part is the the Farmhouse Gloves that Kristin Nicholas designed using Solitude Wool Romney semi-worsted yarn. They are really wonderful. I think they are THE best pattern in the book, but just like shepherd’s all think their breed of sheep is the best, I suspect I am not very objective about this.

This book was just released on November 1st. Tanis Gray lives in DC. She isn’t doing a big book tour because she also just had a baby…but last Sunday afternoon she did a book signing at Fiber Space yarn store in Alexandria, Virginia where she teaches knitting, this Saturday (Nov 12th) she will be in New York City at The Yarn Company doing a book signing from 1-4pm (and they asked us for some yarn…hope the box arrived safely today) and the following Saturday, November 19th, Tanis will be at Looped Yarn Works for a book signing. Looped is just a couple blocks from the Dupont farmers market on Connecticut Ave. in DC. Easy for our DC/MD/VA customers! In fact, we need to thank Susan from Looped for telling Tanis about us in the first place. Thank you Susan!!!

As you can see in the photo of the Farmhouse Gloves…they use five colors of the Romney yarn. Well, if you buy five skeins of the Romney, you will have enough yarn for the gloves, a hat and a quite generous scarf to boot. We will work on figuring out the yardage needed for the gloves and make up some smaller skeins, but who knows how long it will take us to get that figured out and done. So we had an idea (hoping that lots of people make these fabulous gloves), if you show us your copy of Knit Local, you can pick out five different colors of the Romney yarn, pay for four and get the fifth one free. If you don’t want a lots leftover, maybe you have friends or family worthy of such fantastic gloves to make winter happier? or maybe knitting friends who would share yarn and you can do a knit along?

So, come by the FreshFarm market at Dupont this Sunday, or every Sunday now til Christmas (weather permitting) and see what we have on offer. This week:
Targhee 3-ply
Tunis (as in Piecework)
Karakul
Leicester Longwool/Border Leicester nature dyed yarn
Romney semi-worsted (as in Knit Local)
ready to spin or felt roving
just a few special knit/felted bucket bags by Sue Burke
and honey from Solitude (it’s hiding in a thermal bag keeping warm, so ask us!)

hope to see you soon, or if you can’t make it to the market, remember you can order from the web site: www.solitudewool.com

Thank you!
Gretchen
f-fsolitude@mindspring.com

Greetings!

Ahhhh, youth! Ohhhh Spring! Things are new and fresh and still perfect.

I suspect it is my own aging and wear that make this not only more evident…but adds a tiny bit of yearning to my observations. Look what I saw yesterday afternoon as I headed out to take photos of the baby goats: A yellow swallowtail (at least that’s what I think…don’t really know). This is so weird in April, this picture looks more like early Summer. Not one bird has yet nipped at this butterfly, its wings are perfect.

In the last week, all three pregnant goats “freshened.” This is a term used for dairy animals when they have babies and begin lactating (another spring event!). The kids are all really cute. Three sets of twins, five does and one buck. They are starting to be active…and in a week or so they will be hysterical. Below is one of the littlest does. She is checking out the new colors of the Suffolk/Dorset boot sock yarn. We will bring these to market this Sunday along with two new handpainted colors (one of them match these solids).

This Sunday Solitude will be at The DC Dupont Farmers Market. We will bring:

the Suffolk/Dorset boot sock yarn. Not just great for socks, also good for sweaters, shawls, kid stuff, etc. This yarn has nylon blended in and is washable (tightly knit socks can go in the machine, not sure about other things…but I’m pretty sure it can be washed on delicate).

The Shropshire double twist yarn

Shropshire baby yarn

honey…and maybe—if I’m extra efficient (?) the new Border Leicester sport weight yarn. If I don’t have it this weekend, we will unveil it at Maryland Sheep and Wool festival next weekend (May 7th and 8th).

And…TA DAH!

the new web site is up…with shopping cart! I don’t know if its perfect, but it’s fresh! A huge thank you for the many months of design and programming labor to Dave Wiseman and John Jackson of Useful Studios to make this happen. With this email/newsletter (!?!) we will be posting it as a blog on the site and sending it to you at the same time. In between broadcast emails we can post more info about what we are working on, farms we are visiting, dye plans, breeds etc. Plus you can leave a comment. We love feedback! Here goes!

Thank you!

Gretchen

www.solitudewool.com

Lamb update: more lambs were born this week including twins yesterday morning. Just one more ewe to go. Sue sent this photo of a polka dot lamb, I think she should be called Solitude.