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Shear dedication B B F For the Times
Not at all sheepish about her love for fetching lambs, proud rams and bleating ewes in her flock, Julia Demaree of Bailey tenderly cares for her woolly charges, and she’s grateful for all they give her in return. “(They) live a wonderful life until (they) get ate,” Demaree said. Demaree is the owner of the Lost Antler Ranch in Bailey, and her flock not only provides the occasional entrée but enough wool to make stylish hats of all colors, shapes and sizes. The hats are sold around the mountain area and come festooned with lace, feathers and baubles. Demaree’s chapeau creations sell for .
A yarn about wool
Demaree has spun wool for years and learned how to weave with a loom from a Navajo woman in Arizona. She learned how to knit from a “great big round man” when she worked with the Royal Air Force at age . While stationed in Scotland, a place she describes as being the country where men knit as much as women do, she said that as the men worked the needles, the talk ranged from submarines to knitting. Demaree knits continentalstyle, often called three-handed knitting. When she tired of regular knitting, she began to felt, the same technique she uses in the hats she sells today. “At first I used poor Mongolian-quality yarns,” she said. “It’ll keep your head warm, but you’ll look like a poor Mongolian.” Demaree said that from one -pound sheep she can harvest about pounds of fleece, and much of that is made into highquality wool hats. It takes more than hours to process the wool for one of Demaree’s hats. She first shears the wool from the sheep and meticulously removes the spoiled bits of wool and places the good wool in a washing machine with detergent and hot water. The wool gets washed five times before it touches a person’s head. The washed wool takes two days to dry, and then she uses a drum-carder, a hand-cranked machine with a spool of wire teeth that straighten the fibers in the same direction. When the wool comes off the carder, it looks like a bat of cotton, and four bats are needed to make one hat. She can make bats in a day. Demaree uses pieces of construction-grade carpet to create the mushroom-shaped form for the bats of wool. With a covering of pantyhose over the wool, she’ll wash it with hot soapy water until the wool felts, which takes about an hour. She said each hat’s personality begins to come out at that point. “The wool tells me what it
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Bailey woman devotes life to her sheep from start to finish
wants to be,” she said. She said that five out of every hats don’t come out the way she wants them to. A million things can go wrong, and some fleeces can shrink up to percent. At that point, it’s destined to become a child’s hat, she said with a laugh. “It’s easy to make a hat smaller, hard to make it bigger,” she said.
In charge of the flock
Demaree said she obtained her first sheep years ago for a -H project and learned that sheep multiply into a flock fairly fast. “I have an aversion to cows,” Demaree said of her choice of domestic animals. “When we were kids, we would stampede the milk cows because we were bored.” Demaree’s current flock swells and shrinks with the cycle of the seasons. Demaree cares for her flock, and she’s become a sheep expert. “We call ourselves ranchers, not shepherds,” Demaree said. Apparently, sheep also provide entertainment, and Demaree knows all the tricks sheep can toss at her, especially when it comes time to round up the herd. She said she’s seen two -year-old boys spend two hours trying to catch one lamb. In the contest between lamb and teenager, the lambs always win. “Most people learn the hard way that you don’t chase sheep, and when you have them penned, and it’s time to feed them, they can bump and knock ‘sheep novices’ to the ground,” she said. “A lamb can jump feet high. If it’s by you and it doesn’t want to be, it springs.” Feeding time is also hazardous; sheep are not known for their patience when hungry. Demaree said there are many misconceptions about sheep, among them that they aren’t very smart. “Sheep are fairly smart, and an hour before dark, all sheep come home,” she said. The trick for keeping them near the ranch? Salt. She said coyotes can’t take sheep down easily because the sheep are too big, form themselves into a tight circle and butt anything that tries to attack them. The sheep outweigh a coyote by pounds, and she’s seen them send many a coyote running.
New vendor
Demaree formerly sold her creations in the Conifer area, but her main sales outlet recently closed, forcing her to move her sales operation to Buena Vista. She said the new outlet has been very profitable, and her designs are flying off the shelves like hats in a winter wind. Her hats are being sold at Sundance in Buena Vista and through the website at www.sun danceleather.com For more information, contact Demaree at lostantler@msn.com.
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Left: Julie Demaree of Bailey puts wool through a drum carder to prepare it for felting. Below: Some of the hats Julie Demaree has felted and designed. Photos by BARBARA FORD | For the Times
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