Comings And Goings

All the lambs have gone to their new homes.

In July the fab four, (Sienna, Violet, China and little Pearl), were off to live on Galiano Island with Sarah and her family.

And mid-August the little boys, Umber and Amber were off  to live with dogs and chickens at Joanna's in Agissiz.

All the lambs got to travel extensively on BC Ferries !

 We were very well treated with priority boarding.

We have a couple of new additions at Periwinkle,

First, a BIG beautiful black cat has come to live with us. His job is to keep the pests down outside. Our old cat, Mr Sylvester, stayed  from when Phyllis and Mike lived here and was with us for five years. He went out and did not come back a few weeks ago. Very sad, he was quite old.

Our new, (old) cat came from the SPCA.

He settled in right away. He's a very laid back cat.

The second additon is our little kitten.

Again, you can see she's made herself at home in amongst the knitting.

We call them Jem and Scout, as in to Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, one of my favourite books. This year is the 50th anniversary of it's publication, so quite fitting we thought.

Jack's Legacy

July 31st, was a very sad day for us. My father-in-law, Jack Cudworth died in Leeds, England.

He will be sorely missed by his family and friends.

Jack left us a legacy in his paintings. He was a very talented artist. Here is a small selection of his work.

This is Wicklow, close to where Simon's family lived in Ireland.

This one is called man and sheep, (notice how I picked the sheep pictures).

And this is Dingle Bay in Ireland.

As well as being a great artist Jack played the clarinet with some of the jazz greats.

 I found a clip of him playing with the Butler Fox Jazz Band at the Foxrock Folk Club.

You can listen to it at this link. If you click on the April 16th 2009 show and listen around the 38.40 mark you can listen to him playing. It's amazing !

Jack was great friends with Diz Disley and they were at art college together.

This is a view of their life there, drawn by Diz.

Looks like it must have been a lot of fun.

It's That Time Of Year

When we start to say goodbye to this year's lambs.

It's bitter sweet as we hate to see them go but we're  happy when they go to new homes where they will be loved by their new families.

Here are Indigo and Ochre,

 ready for the trip to meet Kevin and Kelsey and the long drive to Northern Alberta.

As you can see Indigo is saying "Good bye".

Here's a picture of Indigo and Violet a couple of days ago.

And one of Ochre that same day.

 The lambs are getting almost as big as their Mums these days !

In other news, it's always nice when this......

(which is Womble by the way)

turns into this......

and one last close up of nice clean Womble fleece.

There's still bits of the field in there but it will come out as I card it.

A Growing Concern

As well as growing lambs and fibre at Periwinkle, there is all kinds of other stuff that grows here too.

I thought I'd show you a few.

Some pretty little pears.

Lots of figs this year, lets hope they ripen.

A beautiful Peony.

Fennel seems to grow really well here.

Unfortunately so does this giant grass !

That's it, just a glimpse of growing at Periwinkle.

I'm feeling much better now

 

....Thank you for asking.

I've been doing lots of this which has really helped.

Here I am with my brothers. I'm going to catch them up one day.

posted by Fran on Pearl's behalf.

Triplets

I tried but couldn't come up with a catchy title for today's post. Anyhow, here they are, from left to right,

                                                          Amber,Umber and Pearl.

Here is Umber, he is the one with the  dark socks.

And this is Amber, he is a little lighter than his brother.

And here is our little Pearl.
 She is smaller than the boys who are both voracious eaters. We are trying to make sure that Pearl gets enough to eat without being muscled out by her stronger brothers.

!

She's holding her own though.

Three's A Charm

We were over on Vancouver Island yesterday and came home to find Dandelion had triplets ! She had them all on her own and did really well.

Here they are this morning, their first trip out into the outside world.

So far so good. We've never had triplets at Periwinkle before but she seems to be feeding all three quite adequately so we're not going to intervene at this point. Much better that they are fed by their Mum than a bottle. Two boys and a girl. We're thinking Amber and Umber for the boys and Pearl for the little ewe lamb.

There will be more updates so do check back !