05/30/2026
Following that last post, I got a cryptic text about “dedicating karaoke tonight to my new favorite person.” Turns out Kilby over at told Kevin that someone reached out to the farm and bought his yearling fleece directly from them as a result of the post, so now karaoke’s in that buyer’s honor. (Kevin has lost his phone privileges for the weekend.)
A few minutes later, I got a text with this gorgeous fleece photo and a field portrait of triplet black lambs (slide 2). L-R, the triplets are Larry, his brother Darrell, and his other brother Darryl.
This is Darryl’s fleece, and it’ll be available at next weekend. (Actually, it’s HALF of his fleece. The electric fence failed one day, Darrell and Darryl decided to have an adventure, and Kilby ended up needing to cut those two out of blackberry bushes… while the sheep were suspended off the ground. This is all that remains of that fleece.)
So, while Darryl may make questionable life choices, he grows amazing wool. This half-fleece is Darryl’s yearling fleece with a staple length of 9” and weight of 4.73 pounds. (I was not the shearer for this one - that honor goes to a shearer named Kevin, who, for clarification, is not a sheep.) He’s a Wensleydale, so this fiber has a ton of natural sheen and drape.
What do you need to know about Darryl? He’s a huge fan of rally racing - Kilby and Bennett are pretty sure that the blackberry excursion was actually a trial run with Darrell pretending to be the driver and Darryl as the navigator. (Darrell said he’d have kept them both out of the bushes if *he* had been navigator and is giving Darryl the silent treatment for the third month running.)
Darryl plays a mean round of poker and is usually the one running penny ante games with the ducks. His mother passed down a family tradition of deep resentment about the Sonics getting moved to Oklahoma, so he’s currently busy teaching all the new lambs that they, too, were done wrong by that decision. (Kilby says that may explain the weird barn graffiti cropping up lately.) He won’t do anything for a Klondike Bar because of lactose intolerance, but he *would* commit minor felonies for a food court Polish sausage.
