Woolybuns

Buns of Wool

When those temperatures plummet, I huddle inside the house in layers of clothing and terry robes and blankets, sipping hot chocolate and hotter soup.  Outside are my rabbits, housed in individual hutches that I designed and my ever so helpful spouse built, but no barn (alas, I do not have a farm!).  I do provide roofs and sides, and I bungee cord tarps over the hutches to keep out wind and all the various forms of stuff falling from the sky, but the only heat the rabbits get is what they provide themselves.  So of course I worry about them.  But there is one simple fact that will never stop amazing me: they stay warmer than I do!  That gloriously soft and fuzzy fiber growing in great gobs on those rabbits is amazingly warm.

About a year and a half ago, I learned to make felted mittens on a form (no knitting and no seams  !!), then got some batts made up of angora and rambouillet, mostly angora.  That makes for marvelous mittens!!  This pair belongs to my daughter and haven't really been worn a lot yet, so the "bloom"  hasn't fully foofed yet.   I of course have a pair I use for bunny chores - they are bright red so if I drop one in the snow, I can find it.  For the first time, I can now venture outside in frigid temps and my hands don't instantly turn to ice.  Now that I've got basic technique down to where I'm pretty comfortable with the end product, it's time to start experimenting with design elements.  The possibilities are wide open!  I also need to make a pair of boot liners - my feet are just giggling with anticipation at that thought!!!

And now that I'm playing with nuno felt, I've added another layer of pure warmth and luxury to my arsenal against winter: angora/wool/silk scarf.    Ain't it grand when pure luxury is also an absolute necessity???  This scarf is a sandwich of fawn angora/natural white rambouillet as the bread with a silk organza filling.  I'm thinking a blanket made out of this would let me sleep outside all winter!!!  LOL - nope, not gonna try that, though the material does have possibilites for a yurt.  But the scarf makes bunny chores in the winter comfortable.   It's a very nice symbiotic circle of life thing going on in the backyard - I take care of the bunnies and they take care of me! 

I leave you with a photo of Kokomo as a baby.    She is a chocolate torte (at least, I think she's a   
chocolate torte - as soon as my chocolate buck is old enough, I will breed her to him and find out). 

Fiberly Progress

As promised, an update on my fibering over the weekend.   I did indeed finish the skein of merino and silk.  Quite an easy spin, but oh, how it wanted to tangle after the ball winder!   The finished skein is
still saying "lacy scarf" to me.  Any other suggestions? 

I also got three bunnies delivered to assorted pick up points (one bunny going to Canada, one to Utah, and one to Martha's Vineyard, so three different pick up days).  All three had intermediate drivers, something I don't usually do.  But I know one of the drivers and she will give the bunny outstanding care, another one I've dealt with before and was quite comfortable with his concern for the bunny's well being,  and the third - well, she and I just kind of clicked.  She's an "animal nut"!  I knew the bunny was in good hands when the driver showed up with a teenage daughter in tow - the girl hadn't planned to make the trip for the weekend with adults, but couldn't pass up bunny cuddle time.  LOL 

In between all the bunny deliveries, I spent a bit of time in the ER with a relative having a medication reaction, doc was concerned about blood clots.  So far, so good but she's still on the meds.  (Why is it that drug companies can make a dangerous product and the government is ok with sacrificing a few or more susceptible individuals to the dangers???  The risk to all people might only be 1 to 5 % but to those hurt, damaged or killed, the risk is kind of all encompassing!).  In any event, ER time is generally good for knitting efforts.  Here is the first of Andrea's second pair of booties from Grammie Chris:
Obviously it still needs a ribbon and some blocking but it was fun to knit.  The second one is started.   Booties are a great way to use up small amounts of yarn!

Last night, while DH and youngest DS went shopping and the two young adults were working, I put on the movie Milk Money, gathered my bubble wrap, soapy water, silk and wool, made a mess and ended up with this: 
It looks like one of those "support something" ribbons but it's quite warm while weighing I think about 3 oz.  I only used less than 2 oz of wool in the felting.  Gotta love a project that uses so little, goes so quickly, and comes out the way you want it to!  This one may end up as a Christmas present for one of my sisters.   I think I will do a "red hatter" type scarf next, for my mom's birthday. 

The other big thing I did this weekend was attend my grandson CJ's second birthday party.   What a doll he is!  He carefully unwrapped each present and greeted it with a beaming grin of delight along with "Ooooooooh!  Look at this!" 

Of course, we adults also treated ourselves to healthy doses of newborn, too.  :) 

A very busy weekend - I need a week to recover! 

Hairy Secret

Boy rabbit meets girl rabbit and along come baby rabbits, right?  Ha!  It's only that simple if you don't want it to happen.   This is Prince Hairy:
He is a 6 month old pure German angora, quite a personable fella with crimpy and very dense fiber.  His mom, Hip Hop Queen, is 100% new import breeding.  His dad, Mr. Feeney, is 100% old line breeding, known to carry lots of delightful recessive genes for great color possibilities in crossbred or hybrid angora bunnies.   

And this not so little (10.5 pounds at 8 months) lady is Divine Secret,
one of the best rabbits I have bred here at Woolybuns.  Her mother is also 100% import breeding from a different line, and her sire is 50% import.   Incredible denisty on this girl and that lovely crimpy wave to all that fiber.  She's sweet, too, like her daddy, rather than more assertive like her mom. 

So, of course I wanted these two rabbits to meet and "breed like rabbits."  Well, here they are meeting:                                                                                                                                        
  and that's as far as it went.  Last night and today.   Breeding like rabbits is quite a frustrating event!  Sometimes, the pairing might take about 15 minutes, sometimes it happens so fast, you don't even see it even though you keep your eyes on them both except for that sneeze or the second it took to swipe at the runny nose.   But sometimes, as cute as they both might be, first base is as far as it goes.   With this pair, both temperature and time are working against me.   Both of these rabbits are still young (though old enough) and inexperienced.  And it's been freeze the little hiney around here lately.   He might be in the mood but he hasn't worked out a game plan yet, while she's just happy to wander around.  And I'll just have to wait til some other time for some Hairy Little Secrets.

WIP

On The Wheels
Yesterday, just as I grabbed the keys to head for the stable where I board my horse, the barn owner called sounding stuffy and achy and oh so miserable can we reschedule for sometime next week.  So, I had a few hours and an empty Rose bobbin to fill.  Yay!  I got out the 4 ounces of a sweet baby blue and maroon merino/silk blend I got from Celia Quinn and spun it up.  It was as good as Cadbury!  I think 2 plied it will be a sport weight.  Now I just have to gather my resolve and the ball winder and pay close attention to winding it so it doesn't  floopy loop itself into a tangle.   When that happens, I can usually summon patience from God knows where (patience is NOT my middle name) and work through it, but I admit there has been the occasional tangled mass flying through the air to splat with a not very satisfying "pfff" against the wall.   Maybe scissors would be more satisfying?  In any case, this is too sweet to screw it up, so I guess I'll just have to pay attention.

My Roberta has about an ounce of natural black corriedale, alpaca, angora blend on it right now.  I need to card some more of that and spin it for a friend.  I'm learning a lot about blending with this project, always a good thing, even if slow.   Then, once that's done, I plan to devote my spinning efforts to the 2 pounds or so of rambouillet/alpaca I had the guys at Wooly Knob "rove" for me.   Someone in my dentist's office wants a really soft yarn to make a baby blanket - I think this blend will work quite nicely for that!

On the needles, Ive got some merino/angora commercially spun yarn that I hand dyed purple and pink in a workshop.  Perfect for little Andrea's next pair of booties! 

And now, I need to drag myself away from the computer and get started with some felting.  I'd like to do a couple pairs of mittens, and practice the nuno felt scarf stuff.  LOL - no, not all in one day!  But, I've committed to these in print, so progress report tomorrow!  Note to self: charge the camera batteries!

Grinches and Good Fairies

Saturday, with DH out of state, the young adults occupied with work and college, and the teenager - well, being a teenager, I caught up on posts on a horse list.   There were a bunch and it was quite sad.  I got my hopes up as the news unfolded, but alas, it ended not well.  The full details are here  but the short version is: a young teenage girl's 4 year old horse, Cimarron,  was stolen (on her birthday no less), sold at auction and quickly slaughtered for food.  The family and the horse's breeder worked frantically trying to recover Cimarron, but they were about 24 hours too late.  There are laws in place to prevent this, but the laws apparently are all too often not enforced. 

Cimarron's 13 year old owner, Skye, is devastated.  But she is also committed to preventing someone else from experiencing this heartbreak.  At this point, she is focusing her grief on ensuring the thief is punished and getting laws enforced.   I encourage any of you who understand the deep emotion we put into the animals in our lives to please check out Stolen Horse International  to see how you can help. 

There is only one bit of bright in this story: horse people connected by the internet everywhere are responding in quite large numbers to the girl's grief.   Horses are being offered to Skye and money is being offered for buying another horse for the girl.  While she is too deep in mourning for her beloved Cimarron to consider another horse at this time, Skye at least has some reassurance that there are far more good fairies than grinches in her world.  And there can never be too many good fairies.  If this situation is not something you can participate in, then do a random act of kindness in Cimarron's memory and to honor Skye.

Chris

Puff Daddy and Celia Quinn

Woolybuns Puff Daddy making his debut!  :)   He is 7 weeks old, dob 10-19-04, a pure German angora buck.  He is from the 2002 import lines.  A couple of breeders imported new angora rabbits from Germany in 2002 - angora rabbit breeders in Germany follow a very rigorous standard resulting in some impressive density and crimp in the fiber; when someone refers to German angoras as the new imports or the 2002 import lines, these are the rabbits referenced.  There were only 3 kits in this litter, 2 survived.  Puff Daddy will be staying here with me, while his brother will be traveling south.   I frequently get asked "how can you part with them?"  When I know they are going to good homes where they will be loved and cared for, it's easy.  The beaming faces of the welcoming family makes it ok.   

Last weekend, I had the great pleasure of learning with Celia Quinn.   She made a many state tour through the northeast this fall, joining Nutmeg Spinners for our regular meeting, where she presented a lecture/slide show on the history of spinning followed by hands on work with support spindles.  Then the following day, Celia led a workshop on novelty spinning.  Woo hoooooo!!  It was
great fun!  Celia is as talented as she is nice!  We practiced a bunch of different types of fun spinning techniques, including boucle, seed  (which I've also seen referred to as knots), garnetted, knickerbocker,  eyelash - that was both quite fun and surprisingly simple, though you need a specific fiber to make it (silk waste, I believe) and it's apparently not readily available.   So I'm glad I at least got to try it out.   

The opportunity to learn both from a teacher and by experimenting on my own is possibly my  biggest   enjoyment in the fiber arts - well, besides those bundles of bunny in the back yard!   When I first started spinning, I kept hearing about "the right way to do things" and that angora was difficult to spin.  But figuring out that there is no *one* right way freed me to learn a lot more.   There may very well be only one right way for some people, but for others of us, the "right" way is any way that works!   As for spinning angora, it's not difficult.  Angora as a fiber is a bit more slippery than some other fibers so it might take a bit more practice before the fingers come to embrace it, but that practice is well worth the time and effort!  My favorite way to spin angora by itself is from the fold: using raw angora, simply take a small hunk and fold it in half over your index finger, holding the ends on either side with you thumb and the "anti-social" finger.  Then pull up a few strands of angora from the fingernail end and spin from that.   I'll put up photos of that as soon as I can bribe a kid into taking them! 

So, to encourage folks to experiment, I'll be happy to send a small hunk of angora to the first 5 people who email me with their snail mail address asking for some.  The fondle fun alone is worth the effort!

And just in case Puff Daddy isn't a big enough helping of cute for you, here's a three week old chocolate bunny just learning to eat solid food. 

Grammie knits

Judging from the expression on Andrea's face, perhaps she didn't like the booties!   But I had fun knitting them.  :)  The yarn came from a dye workshop I took in Ohio at Fiber Fest  last June, a merino/angora commercially spun yarn that I tye dyed using three colors.  In the steaming, the colors bleed and blend a bit so the yarn ended up with many fun shades.  After the workshop, Lisa found out her baby would be a girl.   Finally, I could get started doing the Grammie Knit thing!  Lisa told me she doesn't like pink, so this yarn just seemed to fit the need.   I love knitting and crocheting booties!  In the shaping process, they go through some fun transformations.  This particular pair at one point looked like a mini bra.   Some of the crochet bootie patterns I have spend time pretending to be little toy cars.   Now here's a happier photo of Andrea and her booties (snuggled in Grammie's arms!).   

This is another of my favorite knitting projects.  I call it the Woolybuns Skinny Lace Scarf.  I had lots of angora and some dyed silk, so I sent it off for blending and commercial spinning in a sport weight.  I love the yarn but it's expensive (yup, I have some for sale, some in this color, some in a black raspberry ice cream color and some natural white).  So I wanted to offer a small project that would wrap someone in luxury without breaking the bank.  I knit a scarf using a variation of feather and fan and using just two ounces of my yarn, I ended up with about 6 feet of skinny scarf!   Feather and fan lace is such a wonderful start in lace knitting!  It's only 18 stitches for one repeat, and only one row of pattern involving K2tog and YO, combined with knit and purl rows.   The variation I used is pattern row, purl row, knit row, purl row, repeat the 4 rows until it's as long as you want it. 

Ok, time to go play with the "grand kiddies!"  :)

Chris

A new granddaughter

Andrea Meegan made her way into the world this morning at 5:06 - so that gives her a birth date of 12-3-4 5:06.  She is a pretty, healthy little thing, who gave her mom a surprise c-section because at the last minute, the baby flipped for butt first presentation.  Both are doing well though.  I have already been to the hospital and snapped the first of many photos! 

 

Andrea joins her big brother, Christopher Joseph aka CJ, a cheerful and highly active kiddo who will turn 2 on Dec. 20.   

Ok, back to the hospital so youngest son can meet his new niece!  And Grammie can snuggle the baby some more! 

Chris

Enabling Felters

Fibering seems to bring out a generosity and supportive cooperation that often doesn't happen with other activities, particularly competition type activities.   I'm not sure why fibering triggers that enormous encouragement but it is wonderful.  One list I am on,  NETA  , New England Textile Arts, "happened" because of this phenomenon: idle chit chat about how nice it would be to have a mid-dreary winter's escape.  Soon, over three hundred people arranged to gather at a hotel for Spa Knit and Spin and it has become an annual, low cost but high fullfillment retreat which celebrates mutual support .  I am constantly amazed at how that plays out on the list.   The latest unfolding chapter in that book is a felters enabling party.  :)  Someone on list posted a link to some pretty amazing examples of nuno felting and wondered what the process was. Since I had recently taken two nuno felt workshops and plan to fully explore that technique, I posted a bit about my experience.  My friend Kim suggested a felting party and quite quickly, that plan is taking shape.  Folks just spontaneously pitching in to find a place to get together for a fun day of learning and sharing and already about 10 people planning to join in.  It's quite amazing to watch such things unfold just from good hearts!   This is a photo of the kind of thing we will be doing:

Nuno felt is a process of combining woven fabric with wet felting techniques to produce a strong yet lightweight garment or object.  Creative possiblities are unlimited!  I have a thought in mind - can't explain it yet - but I hope by mid winter to put a photo up here of a FO using angora and nuno felt.

 

The wonders unfolding in the backyard are equally enjoyable so I leave you today with one of my newest favorite photos, Woolybuns Murphy Brown:

 

 

Chris