BLESSINGS!

We have had a very blessed year! There have been a lot of ups and downs, but God has taken care of us! We have done a lot of work on our barn. My husband is making it look like a new barn! We were worried about how we would get the building supplies we would need to get some structural damage fixed on it. Preston is a carpenter, and work has been very slow! We just started working on it with nothing, trusting that it would be provided. We started out by using some telephone poles my husband had saved up that the electric company had given us through the years to fix the rotting posts on the north side that had been exposed to the weather for several years. We also recycled a lot of the barn wood we took down around the feed room. It used to be a corn crib that went almost all the way up to the roof of the barn. We lowered it and put our loft above our now, feed room. So, we ended up with lots of boards to fix the north side! We were also given some barn tin, by a farmer we know, to close up the east side of the barn.  I prayed that we would be provided with the materials, and little by little, they came! There is still a lot of work in progress, but it will be wonderful when it is done! I am so thankful for my husband. The barn is something that I have wanted to improve for a long time and he has done a great job! We have always used just one side of it for our alpacas. Now we are able to use the whole barn! And it is even more wonderful because last November we acquired 5 new alpacas!! We have a new herdsire, his name is Johnny Cash. It was so amazing and he was meant to be here because, we LOVE the real Johnny Cash! He is a beautiful, all black, award winning, suri alpaca! He will have his first cria on the ground, here, at our farm, in the Fall. We are looking so forward to that! Not only will we be having his cria, but we will be having 2 more crias born here in the Fall also! Our new girls are Melee, Cascada, Shake Rattle N Roll, and Motley Too! They are all so sweet! And they make me so happy!

I have been working at perfecting my spinning. I learned how to ply my yarn this winter. I made my first skein of yarn a few weeks before Christmas. It meant a lot to me because it was made from Egg Nog and Theoden's fiber, and that I made it myself! It wasn't a very big amount of yarn, but my daughter promptly took it and crochet a muffler for me. 


We are planning to participate in the MOPACA fiber arts show in March. It will be in Kansas City again. My daughter, Sarah has had a lot of success with her business. She has her fiber art in 2 businesses and her 2 online shops. Easter is coming up soon, and I will be posting some of her Easter creations on our blog and Facebook pages. Sarah has also been teaching her felting in the same shops. In January we were invited to speak to the Quilters Guild in Higginsville, MO. We talked about raising our animals and the fiber they produce. I demonstrated my spinning for them as well. The ladies found it very interesting and seemed to love all the things we showed them that can be made with our fiber. It was fun!


I have been using a drum carder to get larger batches of our fiber carded. It is a wonderful thing to have if you have lots of fiber to card. Sarah has been after me to speed up the yarn making process! She has lots of things she wants to make. I homeschool my son, so sometimes it's hard to find time to sit at the spinning wheel after a busy day. I'm trying to make myself  work at if more often. It is hard to stop, once you start.


We still have a ton of work to do to get things the way we want them to be. We have been very lucky to have such a mild winter. It has helped us keep busy working outside. Next, will be spring cleaning, and getting our garden started. I am already planning to get my peas planted this weekend if the weather is nice. We are waiting for the arrival of our new Brauma chicks and Heritage turkeys I ordered from a hatchery in Lebanon, MO. They are due to be delivered in the mail on May 2. Last year, we lost a few of our hens, due to the heat. I have ordered pullets and 1 rooster so that we will have plenty of eggs and eventually have chickens to raise for eating. 
I will keep you updated on any other news! 


Lara

New Things Are Happening At Our Farm!

Hello everyone!


There is a lot of new and exciting things that are happening at our farm! We are waiting for the arrival this fall, of some new alpacas that we have been blessed with! We will be getting 3 bred female alpacas and 1 award winning male! They are beautiful and we are so happy! God has blessed us with having a very special person in our life that has helped make this possible. She is being so generous! We will have more info on this at a later date. 


My daughter, Sarah, has joined us full time now. She is so creative and I feel so blessed to have her beside me in everything we do with our farms endeavors. She has been helping us get work done in our barn. We have lots to do to get ready for the addition to our herd. It has been so nice since the weather turned cooler and we have gotten a lot done, but still have lots more to do. We have been trying to find someone with an old caved in barn to get some wood to repair our barn. The east end needs a lot of repair and winter will be here before you know it! It has needed repair for a long time. Just never got it done. We have always just used the south side of our barn for our alpacas. It is a very large barn with lots of room to expand if it was repaired. 


Sarah has been needle felting things for fall. She has been making lots of pumpkins, ghosts, and spiders, along with her brooches and little animals. She has also been making sheets of different colored felt, and trying her hand at making some felted hats!
I joined the Spinners and Weavers Guild of Columbia, MO recently and just picked up a spinning wheel so I can practice my spinning. I've gotten a little rusty since Fiber U. I plan to take some refresher courses with my teacher from this summer. We really need yarn! We have so much of this beautiful fiber! It is really time consuming when everything is done by hand. 


We will have a booth at Lakeside Nature Center's "Picnic on the Prairie", Sunday, September 11th, from 12pm-6pm. Lakeside Nature Center is located on Gregory Blvd. in Kansas City, MO  right by the Kansas City Zoo. I volunteer for them. I use to rehabilitate baby wildlife. Something I LOVED to do and miss very much! Since I had my youngest son, I still  volunteer by doing phone duty a few months each year. Life gets busy, and though I would love to rehab again someday, I am just too busy with the farm at this time. They have been nice enough to ask us to come to this event. We are very thankful and excited to be a part of it. We will have all of Sarah's fiber art on display and for sale, along with raw and hand carded fiber available for sale. I think it will be a fun filled day and hope to see you there!


Lara Goins

Fiber "U" & Everything Else

It's been a very busy spring and summer. Our gardening has been taking up a lot of our time! We have six gardens right now. I'm very anxious to start getting tomatoes. We have 64 tomato plants, sweet corn, lots of onions, peas, and green beans that we will be canning soon and lots more. The heat has almost been unbearable! With all the rain we've had this year, it's been hard keeping up with just mowing everywhere! I can't believe its already mid July. All our alpaca boys have just been basking in the sun a lot and taking lots of dirt baths! When I go out to the barn, they love it when I spray their legs and bellies with water from the hose. In the first week of June, we got them sheared. They act like they feel so much better to get that fiber off! I love to spray them down with the hose after they get sheared. We had to take more off their legs and tails this year than we normally do because of them getting into some cockle burrs in the pasture! I think it worked out good though because of it being so hot!

We just got back from attending Fiber "U" in Lebanon, MO., which left us very inspired! Fiber "U" is an event put on by the Midwest Alpaca Owners and Breeders Association. It's everything to do with all kinds of fiber. Especially alpaca fiber! My mother, daughter, and I went and took several classes. We had a lot of fun and everyone was so nice! My mother and I took beginning spinning, which I thought was pretty hard. You have to be very  coordinated! I brought our own fiber to use. We had a very good and patient instructor. I also took classes in preparing fleeces for show and blending other fibers with alpaca. 
Our daughter, Sarah, took a knitting class with my mother, as well as classes in dying fiber and needle felting, to see if she could learn anything new. Sarah now has her own Etsy shop, SarahsCozyCreations.etsy.com. She got lots of attention when people in her classes saw some of her creations. They loved everything she showed them and wanted to know how she made them! She is very creative.  She is such a great fiber artist! She is still in the process of getting her creations posted in her shop. It's time consuming taking pictures of everything and fighting me because I love everything she's made and don't want her to sell it! Every piece is so unique and I love them all!
 

I have lots of practicing to do with my spinning. I am very excited about being able to spin our fiber into beautiful yarn. There is so much you can do with these animals! I feel very blessed to have them.

Next we plan to attend the Sheep & Wool Festival in Bethel, MO on September 3-4. There will be lots to see and learn there. We hope to find some English Angora rabbits to incorporate into our farm. 

Then, we have been asked to be a part of "Picnic on the prairie", at Lakeside Nature Center, in Kansas City on September 11th. There, we will have our fiber and some of Sarah's creations on display. 

In the meantime, our alpaca boys are very lonely and are needing some girlfriends! So, if you're an alpaca owner and need any breeding's, take a look at our boys on "Our Herd" page and consider one of ours. They are all strong, straight and beautiful and all have different characteristics in their fiber. 

 

Happy Easter!

We got our potatoes, green beans, onions, and peas planted right before we got the rainy, blustery weather we've been having this last weekend. It is continuing into this week. All the rain we get should be really good on what we got planted. I also got all the fencing taken down around our chicken house. Hope to put up new fencing as soon as the weather gets better. Sarah finished building our goose and duck house. She did a really good job! 
Our alpaca boys are doing great! We will be shearing them soon. I contacted the shearer last week, to get put on the calendar. 

Sarah has also been busy needle felting little bunnies and lambs for Easter! They are so cute! She has had several orders to fill. Everyone falls in Love with them when they see them. 
We were so happy last month when Sarah won at the Fiber Arts Competition at the MOPACA Alpaca Invitational Show in Kansas City! She won 2nd place for her needle felted Snowman & Penguin, and 1st place for her button heart pin w/needle felted back!! We are so proud of her! 

 

 

Next, we are planning to attend MOPACA's Fiber "U" event in Lebanon, MO. July 9-10th.

There should be a lot to learn there. In the mean time we will be dying and carding fiber, and needle felting more little creations! 

We still haven't gotten our store set up yet, so if anyone is interested in any of these little creations, just email us at mysky@ctcis.net and let us know what you think of them by posting a comment on our blog or going to our Facebook page.

I hope everyone has a very Happy Easter! 

Spring is near!

Ahhh! I LOVE the beginning of Spring! Hearing all the frogs, you can practically sit and watch the pastures turn greener each day.  The smell in the air, the daffodils, tulips, iris, and peonies peeking through the ground! We have been busy doing lots of spring cleaning outside. We have been raking leaves out of the flower beds, burning off the pastures, picking up lots of sticks that have fallen through the winter, and getting ready to get our garden started. I always think about my dad and my grandpa the most around this time of the year. They loved to garden too and I learned everything I know about gardening from them. And while I didn't always like working out in the garden when I was a kid, I am so thankful for what they taught me in my life, about the rewards of growing something and giving it away to people that love it or cooking a beautiful home grown meal for your family and friends. When I smell the freshly tilled dirt and hear those frogs singing, it takes me back when things were simpler. This weekend, the weather isn't cooperating very well for tilling my garden. I had hoped to get a few things planted. I was already a little late. Grandpa always would say to plant your taters around St. Patrick's Day! Cold temperatures are back and it was sleeting this evening! Snow is in the forecast also. I have our seed potatoes and peas to plant when the weather gets drier.

We have soooo many eggs right now! My girls have really stepped up their laying since they have been out of their chicken house more, scratching all around the place, searching for any kind of bug morsel they can find under the leaves! Our geese have also started laying. They have layed about 10 eggs in the last 2 weeks. I was hoping that they would sit on them and hatch some baby geese, since they are making nests all over the place! But, I'm not sure yet if they are both females or if I have one of each? They will be 1 year old in April. 

I have been taking care of a kitten this winter that was abandoned by her mother around the first of the year.  She was only about 2 weeks old and I had to bottle feed her. Needless to say, I got very attached to her. I'm her mommy and she follows me around a lot. But, she is starting to get very ornery! She is black and white and very cute!

The MOPACA Invitational Alpaca Show is this weekend, March 25-27th, at Hale Arena in Kansas City. We will be there. Sarah has entered a few of her needle felted items she made in the Fiber Arts Competition. Hope she does well. 

All our alpacas are doing good. I just got our hay tested with very good results. It will be time to shear them soon. We didn't shear them last year, so we will have a lot of fiber to harvest from them.

That's about all for now. Just when I was really getting things done outside, the weather has to get bad. Hope it doesn't hang around long! 

Lara 

New Year, New Beginning?

Hi Everyone!
I want to start out by thanking everyone who made our needle felted snowmen a great success! It has been quite awhile since I've posted anything on here. We recently had some devastating set backs on our farm. I will talk about that a little later. 
I first want to talk about the wonderful success we had last fall starting with our participation at the UCM Holiday Market my daughter and I attended on December 1st. It was our first time displaying and selling our needle felted snowmen and ornaments, alpaca fiber, and jewelry. 
Everyone LOVED what we had displayed!

UCM Holiday Market 2010

 

We had a great time! While there, we were approached by someone from the Warrenburg Chamber of Commerce, asking us if we would like to be a part of the city's " Dickens Christmas - Living Windows Event", that following weekend. She said we were perfect for it, and she had to have us there! And, even though it was short notice, they would make room for us. We were very excited about the invitation. She explained that the event would replicate Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and that we would set up our display and sit in one of the windows at the Java Junction business in downtown Warrensburg and create our needle felted items. It was pretty neat and we were proud to be a part of it.  There were carolers walking around singing Christmas music, and horse drawn carriage rides around the downtown area, and in the Java Junction, they were serving a special latte for the day: an Eggnog Latte. (Which was one of our alpacas names!) Lol! We felt we belonged there! We had so many people come to our table and comment on what we were making and would just watch us work with our fiber. They always had lots of questions about our alpacas. Then, we were interviewed and photographed for the Warrensburg newspaper, "The Daily Star-Journal"!

http://dailystarjournal.com/main.asp?Search=1&ArticleID=12848&SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&S=1

A Dickens Christmas- Living Windows 2010, Java Junction

View outside our window at Java Junction

With our incredible happiness and success we had with our felting and the events we had just participated in, came unexpected sadness and devastation with some of our alpacas. We lost both of our beautiful girls after giving them an injection of Lutalyse from our veterinarian. This is what has kept me from updating this blog, due to my unbearable heart- filled grief I have had since this happened. I have totally lost all confidence in the veterinarians around me here. And I have so much guilt, wishing I could go back and never have given it to them, or, that I shouldn't have trusted that my vet would have and should have known that Lutalyse has caused deaths in alpacas. Something I did not know until I researched it the day after I had lost Cafe. It has been a very hard lesson. And it is something that I don't ever want to go through again. In the 9 years that we have owned our alpacas, never once have we had to call the vet out for anything except to check out a newborn cria (baby alpaca) and the mother. We have always done vaccinations, deworming, toenail and teeth trims, etc., ourselves. Something most everyone does in the alpaca industry. We have always had happy, healthy alpacas. This loss was a total shock to us and has brought our breeding program to a stand still. It has left us not knowing what the future will bring. We have had to just sit back and give ourselves time to think and to mourn. It has been difficult to get up every morning to do chores and see their empty pen and suddenly realizing that it's not a nightmare, it is real. All of our male alpacas are happy and healthy. 

Deep inside of me, my mind is telling me to keep going. This has been a tremendous set back, but I believe that what we did last fall with our fiber was meant to happen. It wasn't just a coincidence. It was a blessing. Like I have said before, we have had many set backs in our life. And it was such a happy time for our farm, and for me, working with my daughter who is an exceptional artist. We have 8 years worth of fiber stored and we will have more fiber to add to that come shearing time this spring. I love these animals and can't imagine not having them. Though it's still hard, time is flying by. It is March already, Spring is near and it will get very busy here, repairing fence, getting our gardens ready for planting, lots of yard work, shearing the alpacas and so on. I know I need to get busy washing, carding, and dying more of our fiber for our creations. It's hard to do when it makes you so overwhelmed with emotion. I know there is always going to be some sad things that come with raising animals. It's not easy on your emotions at times. I pray that something great will happen and we will get through this difficult time. Everything that has happened these last few months has made me appreciate and be more grateful for what I do have in my life that God has blessed us with: My family- beautiful and healthy, our farm, our animals. (we still have all our beautiful alpaca boys!) With Spring comes new life, a new beginning.

I don't know what God's plan is for us, but I will put my trust in Him to guide us through this storm and with His blessings, continue on. 

My Sky Alpaca Farm introduces ~ Cozy Creations By Sarah Goins

We are so excited to show you what we have been working on! We have been busy getting ready for the Holiday Market we are attending in Warrensburg, MO this week. Our daughter, Sarah, has been needle felting with our alpaca fiber. She is a full time student at UCM, majoring in Art. She is very creative!  She has handmade some really cute snowmen and brooches. She has been teaching me how to make them. I have been washing, dying, and carding the fiber we need. It's amazing, all the things you can do with this fiber! 

All Snowmen are handmade, needle felted 100% Suri Alpaca fiber!

Penguin & Tiny Top Hat Snowman

Snowman Family!

Here are some of the brooches Sarah has made. She needle felted the fiber to make the backs of the brooches.

More little snowmen!!

Aww! So Cute!

Santa Ornaments!

 

We will be working on having an Etsy shop coming soon! If you see something you like, contact us! Special orders may be placed. 

Raw or washed and hand carded light fawn Suri alpaca fiber also available for sale.  

We will be working on more handmade projects through the winter.