Sheep to Shawl
A story based on the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival’s Sheep to Shawl competition
May sun came down hard between the tents at the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival. The fairground smelled of lanolin and trampled grass, and around the pens the Sheep to Shawl teams pressed against the rails, sizing up the animals that would be garments by late afternoon. The sheep chewed and stared back, unbothered as furniture.
Anna had circled this contest for years. Farm-raised, she loved animals and loved wool past the point of explaining it. She had spent months talking four friends into entering, then more months drilling them. They chose a pattern. They dressed the loom ahead of time, warp threads dyed in blues and greens. They argued over who would weave and settled it the way you’d pick a goalie. Mostly they practiced, at their separate jobs and at the harder job of being a team.
The sheep mattered most. A healthy animal, fleece not too heavy with grease, because lanolin, the wax a sheep makes, gums any fiber nobody has scoured, and there would be no scouring today. Anna found her ewe on her uncle’s farm and would have vouched for her in court.
The bell rang and the fairground shrank to one pen. One teammate folded the ewe against her knees and ran the clippers along her flank; the fleece peeled away whole, still holding the animal’s heat. The others fell on it, tugging long soft staples free of the short coarse ones.
“Every burr,” Anna said. “Out. Nobody wants a shawl that bites.”
She carded, dragging fleece between her hand paddles until the tangle surrendered and the fibers lay parallel and airy. The shearer wiped her hands and joined the two spinners, and yarn began traveling off their fingers in a thin pale river toward the loom, where the weaver worked the shuttle and the shawl started to exist, blues and greens climbing row by row.
Two aisles over, a team that had taken the ribbon before, more than once, worked without a word passing among them. Their shuttle never rested. Anna’s pulse ticked in her thumbs while she carded.
“We’re doing fine,” she told her team. “Hold this pace.”
Three hours after the bell, the shawl came off the loom warm from handling, soft, its colors grading into each other until she stood in the fields at home again. The judges took their time. They ran their hands across the weave, held it up against the sun, hunted the selvage for flaws. The wait went on until Anna’s back teeth ached from clenching.
Second place. Behind the veterans, the ones whose shuttle never rested.
Something wound tight in her since morning went slack.
At the cars, one teammate kept saying it, second place, second place, trying the words on again and again. Another pointed around the circle: “Every one of us. Incredible.”
“Nobody does this alone,” Anna said. All ten of their hands were nicked and grease-bright.
The steering wheel slid a little under her palms the whole way home, lanolin working its way out of her skin, faint and animal. Next May. Same ewe. Faster hands.
Author’s Note
For more information on next year’s competition, including rules, scoring, prizes, and entry form, visit the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival.
Watch a video from the 2017 "Sheep to Shawl" competition at the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival.
Sheep to Shawl from pam kaplan on Vimeo.
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