Farm News - 2012 Clip
What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun, -- it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Farm News
Up Coming Events
Oct 20 & 21
NYS Sheep & Wool Festival
We LOVE to attend and vend at this festival. It's just an incredible experience. If you are a knitter, crocheter, or use yarn and fiber products for any kind of craft at all, you simply have to experience this festival. It's amazing! Some of the best artisans and wool providers on the East Coast attend this festival. And people attend from all over the country! We often sell things to people from Colorado or Alabama who tell us they make the cross-country trip just to come to this festival! It is held at the Dutchess County Fairgrounds in Rhinebeck, NY
Ideuma Creek Alpacas | John & Denise Jacobus | Unadilla, NY | (607) 563-9174 | djacobus@mkl.com
Want to see how our fleece stacks up in National AOBA certified shows?
Ideuma Creek Alpacas WINS The Cutest Cria Contest!
If this picture looks familiar to you at all, thank you! It means you probably "liked" it on facebook and helped me to WIN FIRST PLACE in The Cutest Cria Contest sponsored by Biosecure Alpaca Shearers, the guys from Ohio who shear our herd. At $25 / animal - and with over 80 alpacas here on the farm, well, figure it out. It was a terrific thing to win!
It was an incredibly close contest -right up until about six hours until the close of the contest. My students knew how excited I was about the contest and had been collecting "likes" for me for about a week. But when the contest was coming to a close, they pulled out all the stops! Their parents posted the link on their pages, their friends from other schools posted on their pages, they even shared the link on a Justin Beber site! :) Despite the fact that we were always about 50 "likes" behind the first place photo, we ended up winning by more than 300 votes!
Winning the shearing was, of course, a great thing, but honestly seeing what some parents posted about me and my teaching and my connection with my students actually brought tears to my eyes. I also was able to cyber-visit with students and find out what they were doing that I hadn't seen in years. I've been teaching for 24 years and have had more than 2500 teenagers sit in desks in my classroom. Having them "like" the photo for the contest and then "friend" me on facebook has been an incredible experience.
I refer to winning the contest as my "George Bailey" moment. The night that we won the contest and everyone was posting and rallying to get votes for my picture, I really felt this huge wave of support and friendship, a lot how I imagine George Bailey felt at the end of the movie, "It's a Wonderful Life".
So winning the contest, awesome . . . .getting the support from my students and the community, even better!
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Shearing 2012
We have not yet received the exact date of our shearing for this year yet. Keep checking back! It should be sometime in early May. We'll be posting "before" and "after" pictures so you can see all of the new hair-dos and how rather funny the alpacas look when they lose sometimes as much as 10 pounds of fiber in 10 minutes!
