Today I'm talking with Jen at Steel Spoon Farm. You can also follow on Facebook.

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00:00
You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Jen Kibler at Steel Spoon Farm in Ohio. And good morning, Jen. How are you? Good morning. Good. How are you? I'm good. How's the weather in Ohio this morning? Oh, it is beautiful. I think we're on fake spring round two already. It's going to go back to winter again this weekend, but I'll take it.

00:29
Yeah, they were saying this weekend on the news that we would be getting snow this week, but I'm looking at the forecast and I'm like, I think LaSore, Minnesota is going to get rain. I don't think we're going to get snow. Yeah. We had 16 inches dump on us about three weeks ago now. So I'm glad to see the snow piles gone. We actually have grass again. So that's nice, but now it's mud season straight into mud season. So yeah, God love mud season. We have a, we have a dog and

00:59
She freaking loves spring because she can go out and roll in the grass again. But she has these cute little feet and the cute little feet leave cute little dirty footprints all over my floor downstairs. And I'm just like, you know what? I'm not mopping the floor until the weekend. I'm going to it all at once. And then she's going to come in and walk on it again and I'll do it the following weekend because I am not mopping that floor every two hours. We have four.

01:25
and two of them are great Pyrenees, then the other two are black labs. And the Pyrenees, of course, are like horse size. And they just clobbed in so much mud into the kitchen this morning to eat breakfast. Oh my gosh. Yeah, Maggie's a 35 pound, well, maybe pushing 40 pound um Australian shepherd. So she's got these adorable little footprints, but they're not adorable when they're mud on my floor. tell me what tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do at Steel Spoon Farm.

01:55
So we have kind of everything here. I've had horses my whole life. So I've got my three big old horses that are all retired now. And then we have two little feral mini mules. And I say feral because I've literally never touched the one in the two years she's been here. We'll just take her time. She knickers at me now. She does her little mule money. So we're making progress, but mules and everything has to be on their time. And then we have a little mini pony too named Apple for my daughter. So she's so sweet.

02:24
So we've got them and we have Angora goats and then a bunch of just miscellaneous Nigerian dwarf goats too that are just, you know, they're pets. to sell some of the mohair off the Angoras. Haven't had time to even process it lately because I've been so busy with all my other business things. ah But I do really love spinning when I have the time. I've spun my own yarn, did a bunch of crochet with it. Actually made the shawl that I wore in like our maternity pictures with

02:54
hand spun mohair from our own goats. So that was really neat. um That's a needle felting with it, all kinds of stuff. I've sold it to all kinds of different people online on Etsy and then on my own site too. Everything from fly lure creators, they use the mohair for their fly lures, which was really odd. um To of course the reborn dolls, which is amazing to see how realistic those are, but they've used mohair for those.

03:22
mask makers for theater mass in New York City, all kinds of stuff. So it's amazing to see how far that can stretch just from my little farm to all across the world. is one of the reasons I love this podcast so much because I hadn't even considered the fact that that mohair would be used on the dolls. Yeah, they use it. It was a local lady actually, and she literally plucks one single hair at a time into these silicone doll.

03:51
It's the patience I do not have for that, but she does. And if they have really fine hair, like if she's doing a memorial doll, she actually paints the hair on and uses a paintbrush that's one hair width and paints these tiny little baby hairs on these dolls. It's incredible. And then the mask maker in New York City. This is a crazy crossover, but my husband is a lifetime wrestling fan and

04:19
this guy actually made the masks for mankind, for Mick Foley, mankind, and Undertaker, which are two of his favorites. And here he is buying mohair from my goats to make these theater masks. I thought, what a crazy small world that is. That's not small, that's miniscule world. Yeah, that was very niche. that was super cool. Wow. Wow. I just, every time I talk to somebody new, I find out something either

04:49
I either learn something new that actually can be used in my life, or I find out something that has nothing to do with anything that I do, but it's a really neat trivia fact. So thank you. I now have a new trivia fact. oh I've never actually pet a mohair goat and I've never touched mohair in my life. What does it feel like? hear it's really, really soft. Oh, it's so soft. And everybody thinks they're sheep.

05:18
which just because they're so fuzzy. uh But so I have to correct people all the time that they are actually goats. They're in full fleece right now. We still call it fleece. Like there, if you take it the whole thing off, still collectively, it's called their fleece. But it is mohair. It's not fur. It's not wool. It's its own material. uh It's extremely fine and quite slippery. Now that's that's kind of like a spinner term for like the slip or the feel of

05:47
the material that you're spinning, it's so super fine. So a lot of the times people will blend it with wool or some other material to make it a little bit more grabby for when they're spinning. But the Kidmo hair especially, so on the babies that are usually under a year, um have the finest, finest hair. It is like a cloud in your hands. It's so thin. That's the stuff that you're gonna use for knitting like your close to skin wear.

06:15
kind of a thing. It's so fine and so high quality. As they get older, the hair quality sometimes goes down a little bit, but I have one of my oldest does, Patsy, for everybody out there who knows Patsy. She has like no grease to her hair and they have grease called a yolk. It's kind of like lanolin in wool where it has like a little bit of a greasy texture. That's what protects their skin, protects their hair. So goats have the same thing.

06:43
but hers is so clean and so fine. She has hardly any curl. She's just like this big white cloud. And her hair is my favorite to spin because I can spin it literally straight off of her. It's so clean and so nice. But then I've got some of my goats that have really, really tight curls. ah I've made like Santa ornaments, especially with those ones, with the needle felting I've done. I needle felt their.

07:09
curly little white locks on for Santa beards on the ornaments and things. So that's really fun. um Personality wise, they're very calm and quiet. um So if you're somebody that's used to the dairy goats, like especially Nubians are really loud. ah Even my Nigerians are pretty loud and friendly. uh The angoras are so super calm and quiet. They're just peaceful. They're really, really nice animals to have. And I'm glad that we got them. Are they

07:36
probably a weird question, but are they more expensive than any other goat? They are, but the same with any other breed. ah Depends on where you buy them from, what their bloodline is. We have all colored angora goats, which is a different breed set. Then there's also like the American white angoras, which is the ones that you typically find like running in the herds by the thousands down in Texas. Those are the ones that are bred like for commercial mohair. I actually have two of those.

08:05
ah Their hair is totally different too. Those are the ones that have like they're really real...