Enthusiast for sheep

Press, 17 September 1976, Page 16

Enthusiast for sheep

1 A German - born American woman, who

has recently been visiting this country, is an enthusiast for the sheep and its wool.

And responsible in the first place for stimulating her interest in sheep and wool was seeing an Ashburton made spinning wheel being used near her home in the United States.

She is Mrs Rita Dayton from the Simi Valley, north west of Los Angeles in California, who spent most of more than a month in New Zealand staving on farms in the South Island.

Mrs Dayton was born in Berlin in 1936 and was brought up in the city during World War 11. In 1955 she went to Canada and in the following year to the United States, which she has since made her home.

She is a senior high school teacher at the Royal High School at Simi Valley where she takes German. English and French. Mrs Dayton recalls that her interest in wool and sheep goes back to October, 1973. when at the Ventura county fair she saw a young woman using an Ashford spinning wheel from Ashburton in the home arts display. She said she liked the look of it, even if it was only used as a decoration.

The upshot was that she got into a group of 10 people, each of whom ordered wheels, and so in early 1974 she received her wheel. And after two months of “hard struggle,” she says she taught herself to spin. Now she is also teaching spinning. Since the summer last year she has been taking six-week night courses each with 20 members — and there is a long waiting list — at Pierce College in Los Angeles. And in the last year she has also been teaching spinning at another two colleges as well. Interest is so great that she says there is always a demand. She is also taking private lessons herself in weaving on a 27in floor loom with four harnesses, or shafts.

But weaving she admits, has had to take a back seat to spinning and knitting.

this industrious woman has made some 50 pairs of woollen socks, which sell for about $2O a pair, and she has sold about 35 woollen hats , for which she can get about $l5 each. And as well as being a housewife, she finds time to also attend the sheep project and sheep production classes. At Pierce College. She has also been doing that for the last two years after her interest in sheep and wool was whetted In these latter classes she studies alongside a doctor, a lawyer, a woman working for an airline and a hairstylist doing such practical things as tailing, shearing, foot trimming and vaccination. The college has registered flocks of Suffolks and Hampshires and odd representatives of other breeds as well.

Mrs Dayton has her own Sunbeam electric shearing unit with a motor built into the handpiece and an extension cord. Costing under $lOO, she says it is useful for shearing the two, three, five or 10 sheep that are frequently owned by people in her part of the world. One of the thrills of her New Zealand visit was to work for a while sweeping the board in a shed on a station in the Lake VVanaka district, but she declined an offer to try her hand with the machines. She recalls that she was one of a group of three who spent five hours re-

moving the fleece from a Hampshire ram which had not been shorn for four years and a ewe of the same breed.

She said that they subsequently “advanced” to shear six sheep in nine hours, but she and her husband gave up after six hours when they had shorn a Southdown ewe but only partly completed a Southdown ram, whose feet had not been trimmed and whose bucking made shearing of his underparts something of a hazard. In the western part of the United States, Mrs Dayton says that shearers get $1 per sheep, but she thinks that in Colorado it is about 50c per sheep but going up.

Shearers at home, she says, wear gloves — sometimes only on the hand that holds the sheep but sometimes on both hands.

During her first week in New Zealand she was in Christchurch with the Christchurch Spinners’ and Weavers’ Guild and she also visited Lincoln College, of which she had read in the American magazine, “Shepherd.”

She believes that she was able to bring a slightly different approach to spinning to some New Zealand spinners, who generally ply their wool into two or three-ply. Mrs Dayton does not ply her wool and while her knitting may look bumpy and lumpy she says it still feels good to the skin. This meant it was not so time absorbing and it was possible to spin half a bobbin and start to make something. Her approach of not looking for perfection, she said brought fresh hope to those who felt that their work was not, of a high enough standard. Mrs Dayton also visited the Ashburton factory from which she has ordered

more than 100 spinning wheels in a year.

Highlights of her stays' on farms, throughout the South Island included seeing lambs born, helping with the tailing, working in a shearing shed and helping with selection of replacements for wool, helping to feed out hay and seeing aerial topdressing in progress, Mrs Dayton was impressed with the efficiency of New Zealand farmers in handling large numbers of stock and was also pleased to see that farm folk wore woollen clothes.

But she was disappointed that more use was not made of the sheep motif on souvenirs in New Zealand made of leather, like address books and wallets, and others made out of wood like puzzles. She was surprised also not to see miniature spinning wheels for ornamental purposes, and in a country so dependent on the sheep she was a little surprised that an assistant in a shop selling sheep skins did not know what “crimp” is in wool. In the course of her New Zealand visit Mrs Dayton acquired more than 1001 b of wool, including Coopworth, Drysdale, Romney, Corriedale cross, Merino and black wool, also 10 sheep skins, three Rugby jerseys for her son, a hand spun and hand knitted cardigan and .. .

An early assignment after she returned to the United States was to be present at a luncheon of the agricultural committee of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce at Pierce College last Tuesday, when she intended showing some of her New Zealand wool and skin exhibits, and she will be speaking about her New Zealand visit to all the agricultural students at the college.