I’ve been staying at the farm since Monday to help with this weekend’s Homespun Yarn Party. Between working hard and chatting, I’ve been taking photos of the animals and trying to get as many snuggles in with the new baby goats!

Here are some photos from my farm visit. (I shot 500!)

Ernie, the Cotswold, is huge! That fiber is coming on Friday, when Emily the shearer comes!

I’m not sure if this is Dakota or Delaware, but she would not leave me alone! She’s only a year old. Seems like yesterday I was waiting for her birth!

Chickens like drinking in the muddy puddles left by the hose. This one is a Silver Laced Wyandotte.

Sabine is super sweet and greets me at the fences!

One of the blog readers (Hi Amy!) came over because she had a pregnant goat and was getting advice. One of her darling daughters posed for this photo with Camila! So sweet!

Lots of dying going on! A preview of the dyed roving and skeins of yarn ready to take dye.

I dyed my first yarn today! I’m going to make a sweater. This will be my 6th(?) knitting project. It will go from dark purple on top to pink on the bottom. Believe it or not, this all happened in one dye pot with one batch of dye. Does anyone have any sweater suggestions for 1760 yards of Cormo/Mohair Light Worsted?

Camila’s on the left, Gonzo’s on the right. A last snuggle before I leave the farm tomorrow morning!

Gonzo & Camilla

I have some super-exciting new! For about a year now, Gale Zucker have been looking for a project to collaborate on. Gale is the amazing photographer behind Shear Spirit, a book I could only love more if Juniper Moon was in it.

Gale is coming down to the farm to teach one of her famous photography workshops for knitters!

Here are the details:

MAY 15 & 16TH   9:30-4:30
Two days of Photography amidst the sheep, lambs, goats, hens & yarn !

Topics to be covered:

• Photographing yarn, fiber, and finished objects, both on & off people.
• Looking at colors and light, choosing settings,and backgrounds.
• Photographing sheep , goats, people  & scenery while we explore the setting.
• Simple lighting tricks and solutions to fiber &  knitwear photography problems.
• Optimizing your images once they’re out of the camera and into a blog page or website.

Workshop space is limited, register soon !  Fee: $ 295.  by Paypal togzucker@snet.net Includes 2 days of class, and delicious lunch & snacks each day by Susie Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm. Questions?  Email gale@gzucker.com

Gale’s Bio

Gale Zucker is the co-author/ photographer of  the book Shear Spirit: Ten Farms, Twenty Projects and Miles of Yarn (PotterCraft 2008) . She is  an award-winning editorial and commercial photographer who’s worked on assignment forSmithsonian, Yankee, Wine Spectator, TV Guide, CraftStylish, and Womans Day, and for The New York Times. She also photographed the Potter Craft title Mason Dixon: Knitting Outside the Lines (October 2008).

More wrong I could not have been! We had no more gotten a beer and found our seats before we were inundated with phone calls from lambcam watchers letting me know that there feet hanging out of Hannah’s back end. By the time I’d gotten my car keys out of my bag there were two new member of the flock.

Suzy and I left everyone else at the concert and drove back to the farm at unsafe speeds to make sure the babies were dry and nursing from their mama. When we arrived, we found Hannah nuzzling a baby boy and itsy-bitsy baby girl. We had those babies dry and nursing in record time and made it back to Charlottesville in time for the second half of the show.

Suzy in her fancy-going-out clothes snorgling the buckling.

Me and the twins. The doeling is on the right and she is just as noisy as her mama!

Sierra greeting the newborns after the concert. My guess is that she was the only six-year-old in the U.S. that got to see a concert and meet newborn goats at 1 a.m. yesterday.

The buckling

We jacketed the babies to make sure they were warm enough. Doeling in pink, bucking in blue.

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Both babies are healthy and strong with full bellies this morning.

Lauria, the winner of the goat naming vote, arrives Charlottesville this afternoon. The first order of business will be to name these little ones. The naming convention for the goats is Muppets.

In accordance with the rules, Lauria and Wendy in SC will get to name the first kid and lamb, respectively. By coincidence, Lauria is coming to Juniper Moon Farm tomorrow to spend a couple of days helping out, so she may get to name the first kid in person!

The three nanny goats continue to expand but only Hannah seems close to kidding.

Her udder is full and very tight, a good sign of impending babies. And she’s very fussy this morning. I’m hoping she either gets the show on the road and delivers in the next few hours or waits till tomorrow morning, cause I’m going out tonight. I hope.

This is a busy, busy, busy week at the farm. 81.9% of the Fall 09 Shares have shipped, which is a new record. We’ll be getting the rest out as they are dyed. I also have a whole bunch of friends coming stay this week. By a whole bunch, I mean seven, but they are staggered throughout the week.

Everyone is coming to help me get ready for the Homespun Yarn Party a week from today. We’ll be unveiling a whole passel of new colorways at the party (they’ll be released in the online shop the following Tuesday) so I hope those of you nearby can join us. It will be a de facto JMF meet-up, so get there if you can.

In other news, my friend Maggie will be moving into to Juniper Moon Farm this week.  Maggie will be working on the farm part-time, mostly helping with shipping and the like. Y’all will love her. The timing was perfect, because Paige recently decided she wanted to be closer to town- Paige is very, very social- and she moved out on Friday. Maggie will be in Erin’s old room.

We will also be welcoming Seth, a WWOOF-er, on April 1st. Seth will be here for three months. [I'm still sorting through apprentice applications. We were swarmed with them and it's taking me longer than I expected to get through them. Don't be distraught is you haven't heard from me yet.]

For as-it-happens kidding updates, follow me on twitter and stay tuned to the lambcam.

The polls are now closed! Thanks to everyone for voting.

Reader and lambcam watcher Sandra asks, “Why is there a sheep in the kidding area?”

Daisy is my only Babydoll Southdown ewe and she is what they call an “easy keeper.” She can get fat even when she’s only eating hay. Even though she’s bred, I pastured her with the boys and lambs this winter because they were on an all hay diet and I didn’t want Daisy getting even fatter by feasting on grain all winter. Now that she’s getting close to lambing, I want to move Daisy in with the ewes and start her on some grain to give her the extra nutrition she needs for her last month of pregnancy, but putting her in with the ewes and their ample portions of grain would be too big a transition and would make her sick.

Daisy is in the kidding area so that I can control the amount of grain she gets for a week or so, and slowly ramp her up to get as much as the other girls. Hannah is furious that Daisy has invaded her space by Nanny McPhee and Mrs. Doubtfire don’t seem to care.

In other farm news, we had to giant round bales of hay delivered this morning by our friends the Hopkins.

We put one round bale in with the non-breeders and one in with the ewes.

Then, while everyone was busy eating, we fenced them into small paddocks with moveable fencing.

Keeping the flocks confined to small areas now will allow the new pasture to come in and establish roots before the greedy sheep and goats are turned out on it. We practiced rotational grazing in New York and on Martha’s Vineyard but we never gotten started so early before. Green grass in March is like a dream.

The main advantage round bales is that they are about 1/2 the price of square bales. (Each round bale equals 20 to 25 squares.) There is also a small time savings in that we won’t have to haul hay out to the flock twice a day. The disadvantages are that they are difficult to move and subject to the weather. We put the ewe’s bale in the large run-in attached the barn so it would stay dry, but that wasn’t an option for the non-breeders. They will still eat the hay after it’s been rained on, but it isn’t as appealing and loses nutritional value.

Hopefully we will be able to turn the flocks out on to pasture in two or three weeks. It’s going to be 70 degrees today and the green grass is coming on fast. Rain tomorrow and through Saturday, but we need it, and at least it’s going to stay warm.

Still no babies in the kidding pen. Stay tuned.

You have to go over to NotMartha and check out Megan’s latest post from her trip to Paris. It’s all about the candy stores and chocolate shops she visited and the photographs are beautiful! Trying to decide which one to swipe for this post was agonizing. I have to say, this post is exactly what I look for in a blog. Megan takes her readers along with her on a little adventure. I’ve learned a lot about this medium from NotMartha.

I’ve been craving this menu ever since my friend Roxanne linked to it on Ravelry. Maybe Sunday…

Loving this article about soldiers who knit.

I don’t know what my friend Jen does for a living, but she spends a lot of time online finding awesome things. Like Muuto Cat Dome, “a habitat for your pet cat and goldfish to interact with each other.” Isn’t that the greatest piece of copy ever? I don’t have a cat or a gold fish but that sentence makes me wish I had both. And a cat dome, obviously.

Biodegradable toothbrush at Anthropologie. And only $5.50. Brilliant!

Finally! Stylish online invitations. These are so lovely and so much better for the environment than the kind you mail.

Speaking of parties, these cupcake kits are fabulous. There are all kinds of themes, all of them lovely.

So charming. So, so charming.

Beautiful photo tutorial for making these Shortbread Buttons.

You might need the Dunk Mug to go with them.

This Cereal Box House tutorial is sweet.

Love this little embroidered Chicken Brooch.

I think I want to go here for my 40th birthday. (via Jennifer at Sachem Farmhouse)

These axes are just breathtakingly beautiful. There, I said it.

Your turn.

So, without further ado, may I present the TWO winners of our first photo contest:

Joan Fernbach’s hand-dyed, hand-spun Jojoland Autumn Shawl

and

Amanda Boch’s #20 Cable/Rib Cardigan by Gayle Bunn

Nice work, Joan and Amanda! And all of the rest of you. This was so much fun but I learned one very valuable lesson: our next contest will be divided in to categories. So hats will be competing with other hats and sweaters with sweaters.

In addition to our fondest admiration, Joan and Amanda have each won a $50 credit to use in the JMF online shop.

Hannah and her twin brother Martin were my first goats and my first bottle babies. As kids, they followed me on hikes around the farm, trailing along behind the dog and my then-husband. We treated them more like dogs than livestock, and probably spoiled them a bit.

I think Hannah is just lovely. In fact, I think she looks like Julia Roberts, although I totally get that most people don’t see it. Her fleece isn’t so lovely, though. And she is a little bit…entitled. I didn’t breed her until she was three and I had some concerns that she wouldn’t be a good mama. Her mama rejected her after all.

More wrong I could not have been! Hannah’s first kid was a single, named Mint, and Hannah was a fantastic mama.

This is one of my favorite pictures of all time, ever. Hannah and Mint, just an hour after he was born.

Last year, Hannah had twins, Jasmine and Jester.

I used to think I was Hannah’s biggest fan, until my friend Linda brought her friend Grace over to the farm last year. Grace and Hannah immediately struck up a friendship. Grace became a frequent visitor to the farm but really, she was there to see Hannah. I know they were both heartbroken when we moved to Virginia.

Hannah will almost certainly have another set of twins this year.

And she will dote on them as she always does. But for me, these babies will be extra special because Jack, another goat that I raised from one day old with a bottle, will be the Daddy.

Jack is the opposite end of the bottle baby spectrum from Hannah. He’s calm and gentle and just lovely to be around. It’ll be interesting to find out what the temperament of the kids these two produce will be.

Stay tuned. Hannah’s udder is getting full. Babies soon.