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  renda
mckaig’s spinning wheel is at her side when
the New Salem Mountain Festival opens on a cool
Saturday morning. While she arranges skeins of
handspun yarn in her booth, a banjo player hits the
first bluegrass licks of “Rocky Top,” and soon the
smell of boiled peanuts and fried funnel cakes is
lifting into the air.
 Visitors to this annual arts-and-crafts fair
atop Georgia’s Lookout Mountain can’t resist
touching McKaig’s woolen wares, and that’s OK. Owner
of Rising Fawn Fiber Studio, she knows they’re drawn
to her scarves, shawls, vests and other handiwork
for the same reason she is. There’s a tactile
delight in pulling one of her soft, charcoal-gray
hats over your ears, or feeling a length of creamy
white yarn slip through your fingers.
They’re especially charmed to discover that the wool
McKaig uses in her clothing and decorative art comes
from her own flock of sheep. “People like to be able
to put an animal’s name with a finished product,”
McKaig explains, patting a fuzzy, chocolate-brown
sweater. “This one is made from Cocoa’s wool.”
Cocoa
and the rest of McKaig’s sheep live just down the
road, on 30 acres of pastureland behind the home
that she shares with her veterinarian husband,
Robert. While she never planned to become a shepherd
(“I like that better than ‘shepherdess,’” she says),
McKaig has been keeping sheep for about 15 years,
ever since the couple’s son Colin and daughter Katie
started showing lambs with the county 4-H club.
Today Colin and Katie live away at college, and what
began as the children’s agricultural project has
become their mother’s passion.
“I
enjoy my sheep as pets,” McKaig tells me later, as
we negotiate a muddy path to her barn. She’s invited
me to meet her two new “girls,” ewes named Persia
and Sprout, who greet us with loud, deep bleats.
They’re unhappy about being temporarily quarantined
in one of the stalls, but as soon as Dr. McKaig
gives them a clean bill of health, they’ll join the
rest of the flock outdoors. At its spring peak,
Brenda McKaig’s flock numbers around 50: two rams,
25 ewes and 24 lambs.
Scarlett, one of the farm’s older ewes, hurries into
the barn when she hears the commotion, probably more
worried about the chance of missing a meal than
anything else. We stop to give her a friendly
scratch behind the ears while she nuzzles our
pockets. She’s a Suffolk-Hampshire cross, a mix of
two English breeds that are characterized by their
black legs and faces. McKaig owns about a half-dozen
Suffolk-Hampshires, mostly for raising lambs to sell
at market.
The
rest of her sheep are her prized wool-producers.
They’re Finnish Landrace, or “Finnsheep,” a breed
that dates back several hundred years and probably
descends from wild mouflon sheep that roam Sardinia
and Corsica.
Sheep
have been our companions since ancient times.
Archaeologists believe that they were among
humanity’s first domesticated animals, and that
they’ve been selectively bred for wool for at least
6,000 years.
 In
America, sheep arrived with Spanish explorers in the
1500s. They’ve been an important part of the
American economy ever since, providing wool for
coats and blankets, milk for cheese and yogurt,
lanolin for soap and lotion, and even fiber for
tennis balls.
While
other countries currently outrank the United States
in wool production—Australia leads the world—recent
industry figures show that Americans are keeping
some 6.4 million sheep and lambs on farms and
ranches in all 50 states. The actual number is
probably higher, since there’s no way to count all
the small operations out there.
With
her modest flock, McKaig isn’t trying to produce
large amounts of wool. Instead, she raises Finns for
their sweet dispositions, and because they provide a
soft, lustrous wool that has a good “crimp,” or
curl, for her fiber arts.
In
addition to caring for her sheep—lambing season
requires the shepherd’s closest attention, while the
rest of the year the sheep don’t require much beyond
daily food and water, and an occasional
vaccination—McKaig handles every aspect of
processing their wool. She starts by shearing the
flock as soon as temperatures rise in early spring.
It’s a tough job that can take her an hour or more
per sheep, especially if the animal resists and has
to be caught and wrestled to the ground.
Each
shorn Finn yields about 5 pounds of usable fleece.
McKaig sells some to other spinners around the
country. Her prices range from about $5 a pound for
raw wool, or what she calls “the plain, white
stuff,” to $20 and up per pound of dyed roving ready
to spin, all of which can be purchased through her
Web site (www.brendamckaig.com).
The
rest of the wool goes into McKaig’s fiber studio.
There it’s washed in gentle detergents and spread
out to dry in the sun. She laughs at the suggestion
that wet wool smells unpleasant, like a wet dog.
“Does your wool coat smell like a wet dog if you’re
out in the rain?” she asks. “No. It smells great!”
Once
the wool is clean and dry, it’s carded, or combed,
to straighten the fibers. “That can take forever,”
says McKaig, so she usually sends her wool out for
that process. Finally it’s ready to spin. Spinning
is also labor-intensive. It takes McKaig two days to
produce enough yarn for an adult-size sweater, and
that’s working straight through.
All
this sounds time-consuming and tedious, especially
when craft stores sell inexpensive skeins. But
McKaig spins because it relaxes her and it’s
practical. “It’s the simplicity that appeals to me,
that it’s just my hands and my wool,” she says. “I
also feel that I get a better product. You can
hardly buy 100 percent natural fiber of any kind
anymore. Most commercial yarn has synthetics in it.”
When
she has enough yarn for a project, she knits it, or
weaves it on an old family loom in her fiber studio.
“I’m not fast,” McKaig admits. “Weaving a
full-length coat took me six weeks. And I don’t do
fancy knit stitches.”
Still, customers snap up her original designs, and
her do-it-yourself classes are popular, including
workshops on dyeing wool.
Fiber
artists say that “old-fashioned” crafts like
McKaig’s are becoming trendy and popular again.
“There’s a movement toward simplification that’s
bringing people back to them,” says Liz Gipson, a
managing editor with Interweave Press, a publisher
of books and magazines on such crafts. “Spinning and
weaving are heritage skills as old as cooking and
building shelter. There’s a need for these
high-touch arts in a high-tech world.
McKaig even sees a lot of interest in the sheep
themselves. Every summer, she’s invited to show them
at local mission conferences and vacation Bible
schools. At other times of the year, they’re in
demand for Christmas nativity scenes and Easter
pageants.
Sometimes McKaig and 2-year-old Gracie, one of her
favorite Finns, take to the road, giving
demonstrations at libraries, art shows and
agricultural events. McKaig is an able lecturer,
knowledgeable about topics that range from textiles
and natural dyes to Navajo sheep herding and
Cherokee finger weaving. Gracie’s role in public is
much easier. “She loves having the sides of her face
scratched,” McKaig says, “and she likes to untie
people’s shoes and pull the strings out of their
jackets.”
Back
at home, the sheep often entertain visiting
schoolchildren. More than 3,000 kids have made field
trips to see Gracie, Scarlett, Cocoa and the rest of
the flock. McKaig’s glad to share her animals and
art with them: “When I was first exposed to spinning
and weaving, lightning didn’t hit me. But later I
realized I was carrying on a lost art, so I hope I
can pass that on to some of these children. Maybe in
later years it will help shape their lives.” 
Frequent
Sky contributor
Lynn Coulter raises a flock of purebred dust
bunnies at her home in Douglasville, Georgia. |
