I'm just headed out to see the sheep.

I'd like to give the sheep an afternoon snack.

If you're really into food, you probably do things like learn how to bake bread or grow heirloom vegetables.

If you're into wine, you go to wine tastings, tour vineyards. Knitters are no different.

Let's say you start knitting and start learning about

yarn how it's made. And once you get into yarn, you want to get closer to the animals that

produce it. This is how sheep obsession begins. You're listening to Fibernation, a knitting podcast

that goes beyond knitting. I'm your host, Alison Corleski. I have a confession to make.

I have long had this fantasy of raising sheep, and it looks like something out of Walt Disney.

I dream about quitting my job and spending my days in a pasture with my own small flock.

That's my fantasy. Does it have any connection with reality? In this episode, I find out by talking

with Kate Larson, who currently keeps 60 sheep on her family farm in Indiana. Kate is a knitter, a spinner,

and a shepherd. As we'll hear, shepherding is more than raising a bunch of sheep. It's creating a

flock with a purpose, generations down the

road. It's a lot of hard questions, usually with very complicated answers.

I also want to jump back to something you've said a couple of times now, where you've said

about sheep or smart. Really? Truly. Yes,

they can be. Kate is the editor of Spin-Off, a magazine about hand-spinning yarn. But her relationship

with sheep and fiber go way back to growing up on her family's 400-acre farm. She's the sixth

generation to live there.

Kate raises border lester sheep, and it's what she wanted to do as long as she can remember.

I went off to university to study sheep.

...