Posted by roo on January 29th, 2009 — Posted in Farm Entry
Well, not exactly HOME as in OUR FARM home, but home to Alabama. Recently we met Linda and Mark Rosenbaum from My Sweet Alpaca (http://www.MySweetAlpaca.com) - we were delighted with their farm, fell in love with their alpacas, and were amazed at the knowledge that Linda has tucked under her belt since bringing home their alpacas three years ago. After meeting them I knew without a doubt that our herd would be taken excellent care of there, and with a small handful of babies arriving before the middle of the year it’s nice to know I only have to drive for an hour to meet our newest arrivals as their dams deliver them. I wanted to bring Mazara down from Ohio to join the rest of the herd too, but Rachel has indicated that she’s enjoying having Mazara and that Mazara seems very much at home on her farm. So for now Mazara will stay in OH, at least until she has had her cria and has been rebred and confirmed pregnant at Zenith Alpacas.
Moving the animals into Alabama requires fecal testing and the pain-in-the-butt BVD-PCR screening, but once we get the results back we can load them all up and take them to their new home.
I went to SC for a few days so that I could assist John and the vet, and took fleece samples at the same time so that I can get them in to Yocom McColl before the rush and backlog at shearing time. This is the first year we are testing Billie and I’m curious to see what his results will be. This year I am also planning to show Demi and Marius… I’m a little nervous about that but am confident that Linda will guide me in the right direction seeing she knows the ropes.
Demi (and Katie)
Demi and mom Penelope
Demi and mom Penelope
Myra (snuggling with mom Dee)
Marius… and mom Julia
Marius
2 Comments »
Posted by roo on January 6th, 2009 — Posted in Bunnies, Fiber
Sienna sits in her cage and smiles mugly at me… well, at least that’s what it looks like. On day 32, after spending a few days laying on her side with flattened ears, in obvious discomfort, I found her bouncing around her cage with renewed energy, playing with her pine cone that I’d given her a few weeks ago and not shown any interest in. Feeling her belly, I notice right away that it’s no longer swollen, there is no movement, and I hear no gas in there. Curious, I peek in her nest box. It’s empty, of course. I actually searched around in her cage, thinking that perhaps she had dropped them somewhere else, but there was not a baby to be found. How disappointing. But good that she’s feeling better.
We have decided not to breed her again until we have relocated to our farm.
Cleaning raw fiber by hand is horribly time consuming. I get asked a lot ‘how do you get debris out of alpaca fiber?’ It’s simple. SLOWLY. One handful of staples at a time. Alpaca is notorious for having a lot of dust, dirt and debris, due to all the rolling around in the dirt they love to do. Even blowing their fiber out with a leaf blower right before they are shorn does not get rid of all the debris. Hand processing alpaca fiber is truly a labour of love… and a lengthy one.
So I decided to treat myself when I saw some lovely purple fiber batts at WhorlingTides. No cleaning, no carding, no dyeing… just pulling them into lovely little rovings and spinning!
She sent me a bunch of other stuff too, silky golden mohair (angora goat) locks and died sheep locks… a generous tuft of merino and bamboo silk, dyed in beautiful shades of green and purple. It was amazing, opening her package! What a delight to be able to sit and spin right away.
And lastly, a brief eye-opening and somewhat nauseating explanation of silk, taken from Wikipedia:
“Wild silks” are produced by caterpillars other than the mulberry silkworm and can be artificially cultivated. A variety of wild silks have been known and used in China, South Asia, and Europe since early times, but the scale of production was always far smaller than that of cultivated silks. They differ from the domesticated varieties in color and texture, and cocoons gathered in the wild usually have been damaged by the emerging moth before the cocoons are gathered, so the silk thread that makes up the cocoon has been torn into shorter lengths. Commercially reared silkworm pupae are killed by dipping them in boiling water before the adult moths emerge, or by piercing them with a needle, allowing the whole cocoon to be unraveled as one continuous thread. This permits a much stronger cloth to be woven from the silk. Wild silks also tend to be more difficult to dye than silk from the cultivated silkworm.
Boy, am I glad that so far I have used mainly tussah silk, which is harvested from the cocoons of the wild worms. Right now I am trying to find a very bright, high sheen silk to use for the next lot of my Icicle yarn - the big bag I bought from my usual supplier was just terrible once I started spinning it and nothing like the original one I bought from them.
No Comments »
Posted by roo on January 4th, 2009 — Posted in Bunnies, Fiber
Yesterday was Sienna’s 31st day of gestation, and I checked regularly to see if the babies had arrived. Toward the evening she began laying down a lot with her ears flattened, making repeated gnashing sounds, and jumping up to suddenly begin cleaning herself furiously, paying a lot of attention to her belly. I thought that at any moment she would have them. But when midnight approached she settled in for the night and I went to bed.
This morning I found a still empty next box and spent some time feeling her belly. There is undoubtedly movment in there, and she’s large and swollen, but she also has an awful lot of gas moving around in there, I can hear it, I can even feel the bubbles exploding and gurgling in her intestines when I slide my hand under her belly and lightly feel with the palm of my hand. Won’t I be a downright fool if the pregnancy turned out to be just a belly full of air??? *grin*
So today is day 32 and it’s not uncommon for rabbits to gestate this long. We will see what happens this evening.
To pass the time last night I plucked up the courage to once again try my hand at my RUSTIC yarns. The last time I did this the plying did not go right and I could not figure out for the life of me how others were plying with cotton thread and making it look good! To my surprise however, the plying went so beautifully in the first sample (I re-did a sample of the original Glitzy yarn) that I pulled out my basket of bits and pieces and did two others.
These yarns are called RUSTIC because they are just that. Very little carding, just one light pass to have everything facing in the right direction, a good shake to let the debris fall out, then spinning the resulting almost mix of fluff and solid staples into a yarn, bringing together different colours and textures. I find that using coarser seconds in the mix is a wonderful way to add interest.
The pink Glitz mix was plied with a black egyptian cotton thread, the others with a single ply of lace-weight dark fawn alpaca. Aren’t they pretty?
2 Comments »
