All lambs are born wearing sweaters, a nubby fleece that covers their pink skin. But for a set of twins born early one cold March morning, their natural sweaters weren’t quite enough. That is how this project came to be.

I was in the pen with Chablis, a seven-year-old ewe, when she delivered two very frail ewe lambs just after dawn. Even with doors and windows closed, the barn was raw and drafty. The ewelings were undersized and shivery. Even after Chablis had licked them dry, they stood quaking, with their backs hunched up. I tried a brisk towel rubdown.

When newborn lambs are cold, they put whatever energy they have into trying to warm themselves. Cold lambs are not strong enough to nurse. I slipped my pinky (a handy oral thermometer) into the mouth of one lamb. The situation was iffy.

I took off the oversized gray wool sweater I was wearing over my coveralls and tucked both lambs together, swaddling them in wool. Their little frames needed insulation—and I remember thinking they could really use their own sweaters. That’s when it occurred to me that I might convert the sleeves of my barn sweater into a pair of jammies. I unwrapped the lambs and lopped the sleeves from my sweater just above the elbow. Then I sliced a pair of holes just wide enough for their spindly front legs; it was my very first steek, although at the time I had no idea what a steek was. The lambs were now wearing their own cozy turtleneck sweaters. I patiently massaged each lamb out of its torpor, using a small plastic syringe to administer droplets of a tincture of molasses laced with vitamins and colostrum stripped from their mother’s teats. Without having to work so hard at staying warm, the lambs eventually found their footing and their appetites, at last.

Putting sweaters on lambs shouldn’t be necessary. Lambs are born with wool, and usually that, along with a good tongue washing from their momma, is all they need. Messing around with sweaters could actually be a very bad idea, especially with a high-strung, first-time mother who might be put off by a change in her lamb’s appearance
or scent. You don’t want to impair the bonding process, but if a lamb is hypothermic,a little insulation goes a long way. And as I always say, a bottle lamb is better than a dead lamb.

When my original gray lamb sweaters became unraveled from use and washing, my blog readers had a sweater drive one year— sending care packages of sweater sleeves for my new flock’s newest arrivals. Eventually, using the former sleeves of my barn sweater as a model, Holly and I brainstormed a design for the perfect lamb sweater. Holly engineered the leg openings and had the cool idea to use scraps of yarn for color-tipped edging—to make it easier to tell newborn lambs apart.

Her Jammies for Lambies sweater is perfectly sized for a newborn lamb and can easily be modified to fit a small dog. -- Barbara Parry, from Adventures in Yarn Farming