Off with the Old, On with the New

A couple of delightful changes happened today.  First, Stephen Franco arrived this afternoon to shear the goats. 

Stephen is a wonderful shearer and he always does a great job.  When I think how long it took for me to find a great shearer I'm amazed.  It would take me hours of work to do what he does in about 5 minutes.  And he does such a great job while when I did them the goats looked like they had been attacked by a four year old who got his hands on Mama's scissors.

We are down to only four Angora goats now since we lost Paxton a couple of weeks ago.  It was a sad goodbye to a great goat but perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised since Pax had always had serious parasite issues.  His body just couldn't handle parasites.  We had given him every wormer we could find and it was doing no good.  All the supportive care in the world won't solve the problem when the body just can't cope.  So Pax is gone and now the herd is down to seven.  Stephen sheared Orion, Bernadette, Parker and Shakespeare.  He also trimmed all the dairy goat's feet but there wasn't much to do there.  I don't know if all dairy goats have strong feet that they manage to keep trimmed all on their own but that's the case with my three.  Fitz, Harvard and Gloucester all were caught and their feet checked but needed no trimming at all.

The second change for today is our new sign.  I love the original logo with all the color and the words over the top of the loom but it's very busy and difficult to reproduce easily and inexpensively.  Besides both Peggy and I are working hard to simplify our lives.  So we came up with a new much simpler logo.  Here is the old sign...

And here is the new sign...

The new sign is black letters on a white background so it really pops.  You can see it almost from the street and it looks clean.  Once we pulled the old sign down it was obvious replacing it was a great idea with or without the logo change.  The sign was peeling and faded and up close it really looked worn out. You will continue to see both the full color version and the black/white version of our logo.  Our business cards and item tags still use the color version but we will be moving towards the black/white version in the future.  Could t-shirts be far behind?

Our new signs, along with some great new stickers, are the work of B & D Graphics in Columbus, Texas.  Ada and her crew did a fabulous job for us and I would highly recommend them to anyone who need signs.

By the way, for anyone who will be out and about on Sunday, we will be having a dye day.  I need to check the color from the purple basil plants before we put them up for sale and we have a huge new stock of cotton, wool, silk and alpaca yarns just waiting to be dyed.  Come see us!