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.
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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?
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Posted by roo on December 21st, 2008 — Posted in Fiber
Ah yes… it’s been butt in the air, nose to the grindstone for me since my last post - I was shocked this evening to see how long it’s been since I last wrote an entry!
This is due a number of rather large projects I have undertaken, and my days and evenings have been spent in the kitchen with my dye pots (that’s a whole other post just for that), in the bathroom with my salad spinner and oven racks, and in the living room with my spinning wheel. Or should I say spinning WHEELS because a new addition arrived from Holland just recently, a pre-owned Moswolt with bobbins so large they will make your mouth water in anticipation of the huge skeins of yarn that these guys will hold (again, a whole other post for THAT, too).
One of the biggest projects I undertook recently was the hand processing of an entire fleece for my friend Rachel Gsellman of MaRachel’s Alpacas of Ohio. Earlier this year, right after she and Matt had finished shearing their herd of alpacas, she mailed me this fleece, compressed and stuffed in a smallish box. I laughed out loud as I pulled the bag from the box, because once exposed to the air it took an almost audible big puff of it, and sat more than quadrupled its size, on my living room floor. It was a gorgeous white fleece, the first shearing of a part accoyo boy by the name of Kodiac Moment, and it was soft, lofty and sported an oh so long staple length. Rachel later wrote, saying it was probably very sinful for her to have stuffed it into such a small box, but I shrugged it off. After all, it was just fiber, right?
As Thanksgiving approached and I was making a list of all the things I needed to do in my fiber world, the processing of the fleece took priority. I had been communicating with Rachel about my first delvings into dyeing, and she requested that I do some colours as well. She wanted the yarn specifically for use with the Knifty Knitter. Ooooh! My chance to create bulky yarns!
Although I’ve been spinning since March and have delved into just about every bag of fiber that is stacked around a large bale of cedarwood chips in my unused shower, this was the first time that I’d be doing someone’s ENTIRE fleece. It was an eye opener, seeing a big fleece reduced to a pile of skeins that seemed impossibly small in comparison! I also had a moment where my alchemy in the kitchen was not quite working and the fiber that I was dyeing black turned into a hotspotch of black staples sporting bright green, blue and purple tips. Argh! How on earth did THAT happen? Once carded and spun it was the most beautiful eggplant colour with bits of purple and green here and there. I guess I could have dyed it a second time, but I was reluctant to put the wool through another heat process and run the risk of truly rendering it useless.
Every bit of fiber that has come from Rachel’s farm has been immaculate when it comes to cleanliness. At one point I was envisioning her frantically cleaning and picking out vegetable matter before sending it to me, but her pastures are so clean and she blows her animals out extremely well. What a difference that makes when it comes to processing it! However, it did become clear very quickly that indeed the compression of had not been a good idea. It had disturbed the structure in which the staples pack together, turning some of it into loose handfuls of fluffed up fiber which were a downright pain to comb any second cuts out of. Another valuable lesson learned *grin*.
Several weeks later, after I had photographed the washed and set skeins, I stood and looked at them all for a while, proud of their bulky and colourful goodness. Proud of myself that I had reached another milestone in my experience with fiber. But also mighty relieved that it was done and I could send them home. It had been a tremendous undertaking, but one I wouldn’t have missed for the world!
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Posted by roo on October 27th, 2008 — Posted in Bunnies
There are some days when I keenly realise what an amazing thing it is that after all Sienna has been through, she is still with us. Not just with us, but absolutely thriving. It was only a short time ago that I was able to finally get her off the antibiotics, a scary thing that she was on them for 5-6 months, an injection every second day! What remains of her hind foot has completely covered itself over with wool, and the large remaining scab on the bottom of her heel has finally healed and has soft new skin growing there. No sign of the infection that raged through there earlier this year.
At the time that she began her course of aggressive treatment I completely clipped her with scissors so that it was easy for me to keep an eye on her body mass and for ease of daily bathing of her leg and lower abdomen. Although she had grown back patches of her fiber, it never really grew back properly and for months she’s looked a bit mangy, long tufts of wool in some areas, next to no wool on the majority of her body, especially along her back where her ears lay flat - the wool was exceptionally short there.
I moved Sienna upstairs into our living room a few weeks ago when I received a large dog crate from someone who wanted to get rid of it. I set it up in front of the double doors that lead onto our deck, because I felt that she wasn’t doing too well downstairs and could probably do with a nice dose of daily sunlight. And let me tell you, she just soaks it up! The sun is at its brightest from mid morning through mid afternoon, and although she has large areas in her cage that are not in the direct sunlight, she chooses to lay with her body in the sunlight, her face in the shade, stretched out fully, chin on her front paws. She dozes for hours like this, her eyes half closed, once scaring me because she lay motionless with her eyes closed.
A few days ago I noticed that all over her body, but especially visible along her back and sides, the tips of her new coat are peeking through, dark red under all that creamy white short undercoat. Finally, a full coat of fiber growing back in! By the time it is at it’s peak, about 2-3 months from now, she will be fully healed and back in optimum health. What a journey!
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Posted by roo on October 25th, 2008 — Posted in Fiber
They are done! For the ‘Wintery Mix’ January sampler box I am supplying mini-skeins of my Winter Sky yarn, as well as the Handspinner’s Blend sampler baggies containing the ‘ingredients’ to spin the yarn yourself.
My logic behind the Handspinner’s Blends is that by providing the raw ingredients (although the alpaca fiber has been brushed to get all the sand and vegetable debris out), artists are able to touch and feel the different fibers in their natural state. How many of you, for instance, have felt satin angora fiber? It is very different from angora - silkier, shinier, softer. But you would never know this if it had already been blended with the alpaca fiber and presented to you in a roving, ready for spinning!
I’m so excited to be a contributor for the sampler boxes and have my fibers and yarns touched and experienced by so many spinners, knitters and fiber artists.
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