Author & Sheep Shearer
That’s a sentence I never expected to type. A couple of years ago, I started organizing notes, journal entries, and voice notes recorded during long hours of driving into a book, and the supportive, lovely folks at Oregon State University Press are publishing it. It’ll be out in October 2018.
Erin Kirk New designed the beautiful book cover.
It’s available for preorder at Amazon.
Peak shearing season (January through June) has reached its halfway mark, though many folks perceive March and April as its beginning. This is the time of year when I receive a surprising amount of email along the lines of “Can I come shearing with you?” Given the volume, I figured it was worthy of a post.
Before you read the answer, know that most people do not like my responses. They say I am mean, and point out that Jordan took me shearing with him. Yes, he did…after I had two years at shearing school (10 full, 8-hour days of shearing and two certificates) under my belt.
First, thank you for asking. This is an important, gracious, generous request, for many reasons. It shows that people have genuine, deep interest in where their raw materials come from; that they value the people and animals who do the hard work of bringing these materials into our textile supply chain. Folks even say things like “I can carry your tool box.” They want exposure to shearing work and the sheep, and appreciate fiber so much that it genuinely pains me to have to say…
Probably not, with one exception: If you have attended shearing school somewhere at least once, live in Northern California, and have a flexible schedule, your chances are higher than anyone else’s.
Shearing is work. Yes, it is interesting, unusual work, but it is skilled, professional labor. My customers are clients. Asking to come shearing is much like asking “Can I tag along on that client website pitch?” or “Can I tag along on your nursing shift?” Shearing jobs are not (only) field trips.
My customers want their sheep sheared cleanly and well. Most do not want to volunteer their sheep to be learned on, especially if they plan to sell the fiber. There are exceptions to this, namely meat sheep with short, coarse wool who are headed to the butcher. Their fiber wasn’t going to bring much money anyway, so it doesn’t matter if you reduce the staple length with second cuts as you learn. We all do that when we’re learning.
This is why public shearing days (of the sort Meridian Jacobs holds) are so wonderful and worthy of attendance. They are designed to provide a full, shearing day experience, complete with fleece sale, with a team of folks managing everything else so the shearer can work. It is the best of all possible worlds.
It is not easy to get into shearing schools these days, I’m told. The Hopland school I’ve attended sells out in less than five minutes each year, and schools across the country fill quickly. I know folks in California who have traveled as far as South Dakota, Canada, and Tennessee because those were the only shearing schools that had room.
This is why it feels especially unfair to say: If you want to come shearing, it will be in an apprentice role, and you must have attended shearing school at least once, and gotten certified. Safe, humane animal handling, bodily memory of shearing moves, and equipment knowledge are prerequisites for coming shearing.
I am glad there is more interest in learning how to shear, and love that I have more shearers to give work to than I did a few years ago. Yeehaw to that.
In case you’re fortunate enough to have missed it, PETA has waged an anti-wool crusade for several years. They claim shearers skin sheep alive. To that I can only say: Pish. There are so many cleaner, easier ways to make a lot more money.
This anti-wool harassment–which targets ranches directly–means many wool producers understandably and justifiably do not want anyone who is not a known, skilled worker on their property (especially a person who likes to take video with their mobile phone more than work). It’s a sound approach, though it does make it harder to teach apprentices safe, humane animal handling and shearing.
This is my sixth season shearing. Knock on shearing plywood, in those six years I have had to stitch a sheep once. It was a tiny nick, shorter than my thumbnail, but in a bad spot: the top of a belly vein. Of course, it was an accident, and required just a couple of stitches (fewer stitches than I have needed myself from work related injuries). The sheep bopped away and grazed and that was that, while I cried off and on for the rest of the work day like a real competent professional (not).
Crying aside, it was a 15-minute event out of the 525,600 minutes in that year, and the 3,153,600 minutes in six years. Is this event representative of a body of work? No.
Imagine that, in those 15 minutes, a PETA infiltrator has tagged along, knows the location of a ranch, and starts recording. The flock owner and I will be subjected to an online reign of terror and harassment for…how long? Months, years? Does it put the flock owner out of business? Do companies decide not to buy wool from them, to appease PETA? These considerations make it very risky to take a chance on a stranger.
Most people have traditional 9-to-5 day jobs and, much as they might wish, cannot afford to take full weekdays off to come shearing with me. If they can, they often have family responsibilities that mean they must get back home at a certain time. Given Bay Area traffic, this often means they might only be able to be on-site shearing with me for 2-3 hours. When weekends roll around, folks are not exactly eager to wake between 4:30-6 AM so that we can reach a shearing site by 7 or 8 AM.
Weather, sheep, and customers drive shearing dates more than my availability (for existing customers, anyway, who get and keep their annual slot for as long as they wish). If we’ve managed to find a date and time when someone can ride along with me, and it rains, they may not be free on the rain date scheduled for the following week (or month).
In the past three years, I actually agreed to take certain folks shearing with me. I’d call or text to offer dates, and they either said they couldn’t make any of them, or said they could and, when I called or texted with a reminder 24-48 hours before the job, bailed. I don’t have the time for that additional management or the space for that mental overhead. This is not to say everyone is like this, but it happened more often than not.
I try very, very hard to shear at dates and times that work best (not just those that work, but work best) for my customers.
Which brings me to a related, unflattering, and possibly controversial point about perceptions of farmers, and how we value their time and agricultural work in general: Unskilled labor, however well intentioned, is not necessarily valuable – or, if it is, is not without costs – to a skilled farmer.
I used to think “I am willing to work hard, put my back into it. Granted, I know nothing about farm work, or the animals who live there, but many hands make light work, right? Someone will be grateful to have my help. 90% of life is just showing up.”
Well, sort of.
As anyone who’s worked on a team in any sort of job knows, when a new hire joins, they don’t ramp up to 100% on day one. They need training and on boarding, and it takes a LOT of time to set someone up for success. When I managed engineering teams, I was simultaneously desperate for more help, yet had no idea where I would find the hours to give a new person the time and attention they deserved – even though they have some experience and know the field.
Conceptually, we get this. This is why we have managers and apprenticeships. We willingly invest time in people, at least partially because we expect those folks to stick around for a while.
But farmers, I think, we see a little differently than the engineering manager. Sometimes, the way we talk about farmers sounds like the way some folks speak about poor people: They should be grateful for anything we choose to give them. Farmers must be so desperate for someone, anyone to show up, even just once, inconsistently, when it’s most convenient for us, like on Sundays (but not every Sunday, I have weekend stuff to do), and never mind if the farmer wants to go to church or a picnic, while needing a ton of the farmer’s direction and time, and never mind the risk to animals or risk of injury.
The person making the offer is in a position of power, in a way, in that they want to call the shots, whether it’s about the clothes they’re donating or the sort of farm labor they’re willing to do, and when.
Even though we’re ostensibly giving something to someone (whether clothes to poor people or labor to a farmer), we get something in return: a tax deduction, in the former case, and time in the fresh air with animals, on a farm, outside of a city, exercise, and instruction in the latter. It’s an exchange, and we should strive to keep the exchange fair to the farmer: Farmers should not give us more than they receive, as they are already often giving all they can and then some.
And, if the farmer is giving us more (instruction, valuable knowledge, life skills), we should recognize and appreciate them for that, not the other way around. This is another reason I like the Meridian Jacobs Farm Club: You pay for membership, products, and the privilege of learning from a real farmer – and it is a privilege.
And, just like that, May.
I am this tired.
I do not know the last time I did not work a weekend, which was not the point of quitting my day job, I’ll have you know. The idea was to shear more on weekdays.
The frenetic pace of life, the death of someone close to me every single month of this year (save this month, so far, knock on wood), and caring for a cherished friend with cancer, has pummeled me. How did anyone make it through the AIDS crisis, which was so much worse?
Grossly overfed, obese sheep have pummeled me, too. While shearing some of these miserable, gagging, wheezing beings two weeks ago, I hurt my left shoulder. It felt partially dislocated, my left arm suddenly weak, painful and rather useless.
I asked another shearer to take one of my scheduled jobs while I healed and, as soon as I felt a bit better, promptly sheared again. Now I’ve really gone and done it. There will be no shearing for a few weeks. I want to shear sheep long term, for as much of my life as I’m able, which means I need to heal in the short term. Because I could not stop for deaths, my body stopped for me.
Today is the first time I have paused in months. And I need to, because I have work to do. A long to-do list has grown since January, holding all of the work to do when I’m not working.
This afternoon, I sat down to tackle it. Choices:
I could not face it. It was too overwhelming and I too depleted.
But the pile of clothes in the sewing room that needs mending, that I could face. And not only could I face it, I could genuinely enjoy it. I love sewing and knitting but, as a self-avowed anti-consumerist, feel incredibly guilty if I make something I don’t need. (I’m great at ruining things for myself.) And, like most Americans, I don’t need anything. I could go years without buying a single new item of clothing or pair of shoes and still not wear out every single thing I already own.
My compromise is to focus on making things my husband and I do need. I knit a lot more socks than I used to, and I’m knitting him a traditional gansey on size 2 needles. That will keep me occupied for a nice long while. I also need clothing for warmer weather. San Francisco has a pretty mild climate but, like the rest of the world, we have a lot more hot days that feel like L.A. than we used to. That means sewing things like linen tunics and cotton dresses, maybe knitting a linen summer sweater, and taking time with the details: trims, better seams. Jeans require solid sewing effort, too, and those we actually wear through.
But mending, mending requires no excuses. It is not ethically problematic and is almost instantly gratifying, better even than knitting a dishcloth.
I started small, with a hole in a sweater I knit a few years ago:
There’s a hole in my sweater, dear Liza, dear Liza…
Herein lies the problem with pure Merino: It’s soft. Too soft. So soft that it not only pills easily, but breaks.
I can’t complain too much. I purchased this sweater quantity of yarn for a song, not even $60, if memory serves. Even at Black Sheep Gathering, folks apparently weren’t interested in undyed, black Merino and the seller wanted the yarn gone. I happily knit it up and it fits great: regardless of what this rip might imply, this sweater fits perfectly in the shoulders. I was quite miffed when I went to put it on and noticed The Hole.
It is fixed:
I then moved on to a hole in my shearing overalls, which I put there when my shearing handpiece went a little bit too far. I sure am glad that sharp metal only got the fabric:
Now, I only wear these shearing and in the garden, so I’ve got no one to impress, but why not apply a little scrap of sock yarn?
I come from a long line of Polish and Czech people who suffered mightily under Stalin and Hitler, so I sincerely hope these stitches don’t look like little swastikas…
Then I was on a role. I hand sewed some separating seams on two summer shirts I sewed last year, and used my trusty dish-soap-and-peroxide combo to remove mud stains from a very old sweater of my husband’s, which also has a few tiny holes in it. I plan to try a trick I heard from a friend, in which she took fusible interfacing, put it behind tiny, moth-made sweater holes, and steamed and stretched a delicate knit fabric together right on top of the interfacing. She swears the tiny holes are now invisible. Clever!
I may attempt visible, or artful, mending too, which I found while searching for mending tips and techniques. I love that, on the Internet, just about anything you find is a trend or a subculture to someone. I found Tom of Holland and his Visible Mending Programme, in which he makes mending visible to encourage more sustainable relationships between our garments and ourselves. I found the The Ardent Thread (I hope to get into her mending class soon), beautiful mending inspiration at Wishi Washi Studio, and The School of Gentle Protest.
And I feel better than I did this morning.
I think I will also try to fix my hair dryer, with its noisy loose ball bearing from clumsy me dropping it. I figure it is a fairly low-risk endeavor since I hardly ever use it anyway.
I cannot cure cancer or raise the dead, but I will fix the few things I can, and hope my shoulder fixes itself.
My shearing season officially opened on January 27-28, 2017 in Petaluma. I am elated to be back at it, putting my back into it. Historically, the first day back is humbling. This year was no exception, but I got off to a far better start than last year, and I am happy with how these two working days went. Don’t believe me? Note the ridiculous grin on my face as I finish my first sheep of the day, and soak my husband’s baseball cap with sweat (I washed it today!):
Being a lot less sedentary in January and lifting weights at least twice a week helped a great deal on my first day back in the barn.
This first job was better than usual for another reason: I got to do it with Jordan Reed, whom I met at shearing school four years ago now.
Jordan and I are, in some ways, an unlikely pair of friends: We were, each of us, fortunately and totally wrong about each other. On the first day of shearing school, Jordan took me for a “rich fiber lady” and I was a bit intimidated by what I misinterpreted as bravado. By the fourth day of shearing school, we were trading Salon Pas patches and bottles of wine. Jordan took me out on my first “real” shearing job, which taught me a great deal and gave me the courage to continue and book jobs of my own.
Shearing friends are special folk: near and dear, crew and craftsmen, they are the people who have seen you through the wars, who have seen you at your worst, who have seen your stupid mistakes and tears of exhaustion, and bring you back from the brink to keep going, even though your quads may be screaming and your spine feels detached from your lower extremities.
I learn something new and challenge myself in different directions on each job, and this one was no exception. Approximately half of the 77 total sheep had two or more years worth of wool. This is common, because it can be very difficult for flock owners to find a shearer.
Multi-year wool growth creates a challenge for the shearer. Wool is heavy: one year’s fleece might weigh 8-15 lbs., depending on the breed, and it increases with each passing year. The weight of that wool pulls on the sheep’s very thin, membrane like skin, creating wrinkles over time. This makes the sheep’s skin much harder to make taut, and thus easier to cut. In addition, the lanolin can dry out and, with dirt added, create waxy clumps that are difficult to push shears through. When dealing with all of this, shearers have to use extra precaution and time to remove wool in the safest, most humane way possible. It is a test of skill, for sure.
We did a good job. It was difficult at times, but we got through it and the sheep looked clean (and not nicked to bits) when we were finished. Look at this fleece! Much of it had felted on the sheep’s body. My suggestion was to further felt it, which would also clean it, and throw it in front of the fireplace to use as a bearskin rug equivalent. Am I right, or am I right?!
The following morning, we had just 20 sheep to shear between the two of us, about a few hours’ worth of work with sheep penning, gear moving, and so on. It was 37 degrees in the mornings. Chilly! I was so grateful to be in a nice barn.
I “let” Jordan shear both rams. This guy, Romeo, was a beauty and Jordan did a beautiful job:
Thank you, Fran LeClerc and Jordan Reed, for taking and sharing all of the photos in this post. I love you both and am so grateful for the lives we lead that, every so often, put us in the same place at the same time, doing the same enjoyable work.