If you follow us on social media, you may have noticed that some of our sheep are wearing coats at this time of year. We coat our sheep to keep the hay and straw (vegetable matter or VM) out of their fleece. A coat is exactly what it sounds like. It slips over the neck of the sheep to cover their back and sides with leg ties to keep it in place. We haven’t found that the coats are very common on sheep farms here in Canada (when we bought them from the U.S. company, they comme

A current growing pain we have is how to economically keep the sheep’s fleece as clean as possible. Unfortunately, the nature of wool means that once vegetable matter (hay in our case) gets in there it is practically impossible to remove. Our Belfast Mini Mill equipment does remove some of it as a by-product of processing, but it definitely has limits, and it definitely doesn’t remove all of it! It is meant to start with relatively clean wool fleece. So, the goal becomes keep

One major challenge that we have here at Borderlands Farm is that the breeds of sheep we have here are not common in most of Canada....

Adding Lincoln Longwool sheep to our small sheep flock.

A few weekends ago my daughter and I attended a dye shop training hosted by the Range Fiber Art Guild in Cotton, Minnesota, which is just...

I’m so looking forward to the next fibre adventure in my life. As a teenager I primarily designed and sewed clothing as my creative...