Dream of Sheep

Some of you know that I'm obsessed with a wooden sheep that I saw at the New Brunswick Museum when I was about six years old. I was with my mother and she told me that she remembered that sheep standing in front of a yarn & wool shop when she was a little girl. Years later during a family trip with Beryl, Phil, Sandy, Julia and Sarah, I needed to find my sheep, so I got dropped off in front of the old museum on Douglas Avenue and ran up the stone steps in the rain. Inside, I found that the old building was now offices, archives and administration. No displays. All of the museum displays had moved to the new museum down by the newly touristy and splashy waterfront. (Sarah and I spent an afternoon there and it was awesome. I have a saber tooth tiger magnet on my refrigerator.) BUT the nice people there told me that the museum still owned the sheep and that she was in storage (phew-she's safe!)

Recently I tried to find out more about my sheep. And today I finally found a picture on the museum website!!! (So I "stole" it for posterity 'cause it wasn't there last time I looked.)

Anyway-I have included the caption from the site...

sculpture : The Davidson Wool Shop Sheep
Robert Graham
Canadian
c 1875
painted pine
78 cm x 32 cm x 104 cm
Gift of John Alexander Davidson, 1961 (1961.22)

So far I have only found a fragment of detailed information, but it's pretty cool. In a story from Ruby M. Cusack, a genealogy buff living in New Brunswick, Canada ("Whittling Away the Winter", published in the ESCAPADE Section of the Telegraph Journal on Saturday, February 17th, 2007), the children in the family had been doing some wood carving and they showed their work to their grandfather who "related to Dad an old tale told by Joe from Primrose about Tommy Moran accidentally decapitating the wooden sheep in front of Davidson's Wool Store on Union Street one night when he'd had too much too drink. If the story told by Gramp is true, the sheep had his head reattached, as I remember it standing on guard in front of Davidson's as a 'trade sign'. Carved by Robert Graham in or around 1875, it is now part of a New Brunswick Museum collection." So I learned a little bit about the man who carved my sheep and a funny story about my sheep's eventful life.

So-here's a neat article that I found during my quest: How fibre arts have developed in New Brunswick and around the world No wonder I'm all textiley!

And, in a totally unrelated tangent, here's a great quote from Robin Mckinley's blog:
"Please. Buffy isn’t television."