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We selected the Corriedale breed because of their exceptionally beautiful fleece. Carolyn is a hand spinner and we wanted to raise the wool that she enjoys spinning. Hand spinners just love this lustrous, soft wool. It has a spinning count of 56's on the course end and up to 60's on the finer side. However, most of our wool was graded at 58's, which is the breed standard for Corriedales. Local shops have used our wool for their beginning spinning classes because it is so easy and pleasurable to spin and it is remarkably clean because we covered our sheep. |
Purebred Corriedales are typically all white though black is not uncommon. The color in our flock came from Corriedale crossbreeds, as it does in most colored Corriedales. Each of our individual sheep was at least 90 percent Corriedale. We kept about one-half of our flock white and the other half colored at all times. That is harder than one would think, since colored rams with the quality of wool that we required are hard to find. We selected for structurally correct bodies that had size and scale. The wool had to be dense, lustrous and consistent from front to rear with a bold crimp style. While we liked large, strong bodied sheep, we would not compromise the quality of our wool for size. All of our breeding sheep did well in the show ring. |
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marketed our wool to hand spinners. Our sheep wore Sheep
Suit Sheep Covers ® covers year round to
keep the fleeces exceptionally clean. The colors of our fleeces were white,
black, and different shades of gray. The gray fleeces are beautiful when
they are overdyed. Shearing day was held annually at the beginning of February. We usually bred with two rams each fall. One was a registered white Corriedale and the other was colored. We carefully determined from our meticulous records which ewes we wanted to breed with which ram. We turned the rams out with the ladies the first week of October. They would stay with their ewes for at least two cycles (34 days). |
Our lambing season began the first week of March. Our ewes would usually twin, although some of our first-timers or older girls might single. Although lambing season meant being up at all times of the night and never getting more than an hour or two of sleep at a time, it was definitely our favorite time of year! I can understand how white sheep breeders get bored with lambing, it's the same old color, sheep after sheep. For us, it was like Christmas again with black, white, gray, or sometimes spotted lambs all over the place. With that kind of exciting stuff going on we could catch up on sleep later. |
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The
lambs were wonderful to watch as they grew. They ran after one another
and did skippity-doos all over the place. They start to nibble on food
only a couple of days after birth, but do not really digest it until they
are a couple of weeks old. We set up a "creep feed" pen which
the lambs could enter and eat all they wanted, but because of the size of
the openings, the ewes couldn't enter . In April, we turned the sheep out
on grass pastures. They had their own pasture that they grazed while we
hayed the rest of the field. Then we rotated them onto those paddocks as
soon as they recovered from being cut. They would stay out on the pastures
until after breeding season. Our Pyrenees watch dogs, Maxine, Lucille,
and Luna kept the sheep safe from the coyotes.
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Our covered Corriedale flock was shorn once a year, about one month before lambing. Some folks wonder why we sheared at such a cold time of the year. We had a few different reasons. First, having practically no wool allowed us to visually judge the progress of our ewe's gestation and created a more sanitary environment for lambing. Also, a shorn ewe will seek warmth in the barn and she will take her newborn lamb with her. Second, lambing is hard on the ewe's constitution and may even cause a break in the wool if she has a difficult labor. Since the ewes have only one month of growth on their fleece, any weakness in the fiber will be very near the tip and will not affect it's quality. Our shearer did a superior job with the handspinner in mind, taking care not to have any second cuts in the fleece while not nicking the sheep. Carolyn did a "quick" skirting at the time of shearing but later spent about one hour to skirt each fleece more carefully, making sure that the spinner would not be purchasing any unwanted wool. |
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