You were an amazing cardboard architect, lettuce tester and carrot aficionado. Your gentle nose nudges and enormous bunny flops of happiness made my life sweeter. You taught me how filled with personality and love rabbits could be. I love how you could sense when I was feeling down and you’d come over to check on me or just lie down next to me. You were an amazing animal soul and you will be missed.

This particular skein was spun in April and May of 2008.  It’s around 225 yards of 40+ wraps per inch (without halo) two-ply pearly soft copper satin angora that was carefully plucked from Gus and spun from the lock.  It was spun on my trusty old Ashford Traditional scotch tension on the 14:1 ratio (that lovely wheel has since moved on to a new home).   All of this information was written on a small string tag.  I am so glad I got in the habit of labeling and recording notes on tags on my spinning a couple of years ago, otherwise I’d be just guessing.

It is one of my favorite skeins I have ever spun of any fiber.  His fiber is the softest thing I’ve ever felt on this planet, cashmere included.  The satin genes really add some amazing textural qualities to the already wonderfully soft angora – it has a pearly sheen to it and the fiber feels like it’s been blended half and half with fine silk.

The drape of the fiber is amazing, obeying gravity flawlessly despite the fibers weighing practically nothing.  The 225 yard skein pictured weighs 20 grams, and I am certainly not the finest angora yarn spinner – not by a long shot.   Although that really hasn’t been my focus – I spin my angora yarn to incorporate as much fiber with lots of twists to hold the fiber tightly together (which means room for air) which probably contributes to the nice drape.   I believe it’s also the reason why the items I’ve made from my angora have worn so well and don’t shed.   They are a little slow to develop a halo, but when they do, as this skein has from being fondled on a regular basis, it sure is pretty.  I have no idea what I will do with this skein.  I have paged through a couple of pages of patterns on Ravelry, and strongly considered knitting Alison’s Rabbit Tracks. but have yet to get past just petting it.

It’s been a little stormy in my life the past week.

First the snow came, in earnest.  We went for a couple more runs when the sidewalks were clear enough, but the last snowstorm pushed us to the point where it would just be dangerous.  So snow shoveling and vacuuming have made up the sum of my physical exercise.  That never helps.

There’s progress on the business front, but it’s still far from a sure thing, and the uncertainty is continually wearing on me.

It’s certainly an exciting time in my life.  I am living the way I believe is right – trying to make a difference in the world because I love it and believe it can be a better place.  I’m making real progress in achieving my dreams.

It’s just so hard to see it from the middle of it all when you’re the kind of person who gets completely absorbed in her work.   I am slowly learning how to keep perspective, and the importance of doing so.

I’m realizing that life and the memories that are made don’t stop being made when it gets stressful.  It’s our lack of paying attention to the passing moments in pursuit of the future that eats up our time.

I remember looking at photo albums of my parents while listening to their stories and always wanting to have something like that to look back on in my own life.  That’s really my primary motivation for blogging at present, I think.  I used to think I wanted to fill my blog with tons of fun tutorials and educational posts, and that still might happen in the future as things calm down.

For now I want to just keep perspective by telling my story a bit. In order to keep things interesting I’ll be digging through some of my thousands of digital photos to share some of my favorites with you. All of the above photos were taken by me in the summer of 2010 during another stormy period in my life right before we moved here.

Photography isn’t the only pursuit I’ll be sharing – I’m sure some knitting, spinning and weaving posts will be plentiful as well.

While I am lacking in the oomph necessary  to attempt a big project,  finding inspiration and celebrating some of the past accomplishments I have achieved should remind myself of what I am capable of when I’m not under this amount of stress.  And as I get a little more energy and time I’ll add tutorials and some technical spinning articles and fiber breed sampling, gluten and dairy free recipes, thrift shop finds and all of the other things I can’t wait to have the energy to do.

I hope you’ll join me when you can.

~Molly

(Pardon the wrinkled sheet in the picture – I spread out my tools on top of an old fitted sheet which I use to protect the couch from fur)

I have tried tons of different scissors over the years.  The scissors pictured here are all winners.  At far left is a pair of  large shears.  I use these for clipping through matts I have already separated from the body enough to be confident there’s no skin pulled in (it can happen – ouch!).   The next two pairs are the same general type – spring loaded sharp tipped trimmers.  They work well for carefully snipping around the head and shoulders, and can be great for clipping the main body if I decide to scissor instead of using the electric trimmers.  Next are my tiny scissors that I use for clipping between the ears and close to the skin, followed by another pair of regular non-spring scissors.  I have found that titanium bonded scissors stay sharp much longer and are a better investment, although the high quality steel in the green and yellow spring scissors has held up much better than most.  You wouldn’t think angora rabbit fur would dull scissors, but most scissors work only for a shearing or two before they lose their edge.

The other implements shown are a pair of nail clippers and my two favorite grooming combs.  Nothing too special about either of these, but they’re essential pieces of my kit.  Back in the days of the ceramics studio, I also used an air gun (set on low PSI) to ‘blow out’ the bunnies’ coats in our spray booth.  It was the best way to do maintenance grooming that I’ve ever tried, and the bunnies really didn’t seem to mind it at all.  We don’t have that set up here, so I’ve been sticking to my combs and a couple of slicker brushes (not pictured).

Here are my pretty pink clippers.  I got them for a song when a local farm supply store decided to phase out this model, and I’m so glad I jumped on that deal.  I used to have a pair of Oster A5 Turbo clippers but they were so much bigger and bulkier and noisier.  The Laube Mini-Micro is adjustable speed (see the rotary dial on the bottom?), lightweight, quiet, and powerful.  I have absolutely no affiliation with the company, just a satisified customer.  The adjustable speed is perfect for me, since I can keep the clipper blades running slower and cooler when I’m trimming the nicely groomed fur but still be able to turn up the power when I need to trim through tough stuff like matts or webbing.

I have an assortment of blades that I use with the clippers.  I have two of the general purpose size 10 blades (one is on the clippers).  This allows me to swap them out when one gets hot.  I also have a size 10 wide (in black) that I picked up on clearance that works well for covering wide areas of well groomed fur.  The size 3 and 7 blades tooth leave the fur longer – I used to use them in the winter when the bunnies were living outside and I didn’t want to leave them naked.  The size 40 and 50 blades are used for trimming tight matts.  They don’t leave much fur at all, but are the only blades that can fit in the tight space between the skin and the matted fur.  I also keep clipper blade oil, neosporin in case of any accidental nicks, and a styptic pencil in case I over trim a nail.

I store all of my grooming tools in an old plastic toolbox, repurposed from my days as an art student when it was filled with pencils, charcoal and other drawing implements.

If I am trimming to save the fur, I have four half-gallon plastic buckets that I sort the fiber into as I go.  One of them is reserved for prime fiber – the long beautiful fibers with zero to few second cuts.  Another gets the seconds – the stuff that is almost prime but perhaps needs to have the second cuts sorted out or is just a bit shorter.  The thirds are where all of the untangled but not quite as pretty stuff goes; most of the stuff from around the neck, chest and hindquarters goes here.  And finally the fourth bucket is used for matts, short little pieces and other stuff that’s probably not usable.  After I’m finished with a haircut I try to move the fiber into paper bags that are then stored in plastic storage containers.  I’ve found that storing it in plastic leads to felting, especially if the fiber is compressed.

On days like today, however, as I clip the fur goes into a paper grocery bag, unsorted, which I then offer to the outside birds for a day or two before taking it out to the trash.  I know it might sound criminal to toss such fluffy goodness, but at this point in time I am clipping before the fiber reaches its longest length just to keep the bunnies comfortable, so there’s not much prime fiber there, and  I already have several bags of less than prime fiber that I keep around for blending and felting.

Gus approves.  He’s a lot happier with less of a fur coat, but he really likes to get the grooming over with as quickly as possible.

What grooming tools do you use, if you have angoras?

Spike, lounging under the Country Craftsman spinning wheel I used to own.

Today was a bunny grooming kind of Saturday.  I have three rabbits – two angora boys and a netherland dwarf little lady.   They’re our only pets right now, although we’d love to get a dog and plan to as soon as our lives recover from this whole start-up experience and we have more of an idea of what our work schedules will be like.

Bunnies are great pets, I’ve discovered.  I never really was into them as a kid, although my sister had a lovely white dwarf rabbit named Marsha (short for Marshmallow, of course) that was best friends with my awesome guinea pig, Abby.   I don’t really remember much about Marsha, other than how much fluffy white fur she shed.  I have clear memories of my mom vacuuming her with a long extension hose on her canister vac.  Marsha didn’t seem to mind, as I recall.

Fast forward to seven or so years ago.  I was a new spinner, absolutely enthralled with the incredible world of natural fibers out there for me to try.  I really wanted sheep – but I lived in the city and there was no way it was going to happen.  I started thinking about angora rabbits.  I read what other spinners think about angora and how the yarn they spin turns out:  it’s softer than cashmere, warmer than wool, and when handspun in the correct manner, barely sheds.   It all gets my mind going, and when I attend the WI Sheep and Wool Festival that year, I come across a very friendly breeder who has a couple of french angoras to sell.   I didn’t make a decision that day, but after going home and talking it over with my family, my sister said she would love to get a pet rabbit, and as long as I helped with the grooming she’d be happy with an angora.  So my mom and I headed back to the festival the next day, and we took Spike, a wonderfully sweet Siamese Sable buck home with us for my sister.

I ended up adopting Spike when my sister’s life no longer allowed her to take care of him a year or so later.  In the mean time, I had also gotten two adorable Jersey Wooly girls – what most people would refer to as dwarf angoras.  And a year later, I added a stunning Copper Satin Angora who was named Ferguson by a close friend who I owed a naming favor.  He soon became known as Gus.

For the longest time I wanted to keep my rabbits indoors with me, but I had experienced horrible allergies (leading to chronic sinus infections) when I had the girls in my bedroom for a while, and the places I lived weren’t very pet friendly.  Instead, the bunnies lived in outbuildings, sheltered from the weather in spacious cages.  It wasn’t up until we bought our house in August of 2010 that I was able to bring them indoors to live in our basement.

Since then, the bunnies have slowly but surely been expanding their territory.  Unfortunately, I lost both of my little girls last year.  It was so sad, because they were only six years old but there’s no doubt in my mind that they had a rather insidious little parasite called e. cuniculi that slowly but surely wears at a bunny body and attacks strongly when stressful conditions occur.   While I was nursing them I brought them upstairs so that I could keep a closer eye on them.  Spike came upstairs to keep one of them company after the other passed, and soon my ‘craft room’ was more accurately referred to as the ‘bunny room.’

We’re still in a transition period, but at the point, Spike is a 24/7 (mostly) free range house rabbit, spending his days lounging around the living room, occasionally joining us to watch a movie in the TV room/office, and spending every night in my craft room.  Gus lives in a generous sized dog exercise pen in the basement next to Puff, the little bossy but smart rescue bunny who came to live with us last summer.    We bring Gus and Puff upstairs to play a couple of times a week (we’re trying for more) and when we do, we just close the door to Spike’s my craft room.

The bunnies are almost completely litter trained, and other than Gus’ love of electrical cords they are very well behaved.  Spike has earned his spot upstairs by being so well behaved we have no problem leaving him out while we’re gone.

So I’ve come to terms with the fact that my primary reason for owning rabbits is because they’re wonderful little animal souls with adorable antics and soft sweet furry noses that just beg to be petted.  At this point I’d be happy to have short haired rabbits, since grooming is less than my favorite activity by now.  Don’t get me wrong – the fiber is beautiful – but I have a lifetime supply already.  Angoras shed every 3-4 months, producing about a paper grocery bag full each time.  Multiply that by two full size and two pint size bunnies and five years and you’ve got a LOT.  Even when I do use their fiber in projects, a little goes a long way.  I have spun some beautiful pure angora yarn, but I prefer to blend it 1 part angora to 3 parts wool or other fiber.

However, grooming still has to be done.  I thought it might be useful to share a little bit of my tools for those of you who might also have fluffy bunnies, which I will share in my next post.

I’m happy to report that the snowstorm that hit today isn’t keeping us from getting out and running. I took this picture just before noon when we were on our way back from the run at the park.

I’m still figuring out what the easiest way to post here is. I have so many options – right now this is being posted from Flickr, but I can also post from an app on my phone (which I already lost a nicely written post from today, grrr) or by email, and of course there’s also the website. I’m such a perfectionist by heart that I nearly didn’t post this because I was so disappointed that the carefully crafted words I had written completely disappeared. Sometimes you just have to push through even if it doesn’t end up the way you planned.

I am just proud of myself for making time to blog between business activities, snow shoveling and other housework. And of course I am encouraged by the running that happened today, in spite of the snow. I’m not going to let the weather stop me from getting out and exercising!

An update is in order, since it’s been so long.

When I first started this blog (years ago, now) I was working with my boyfriend Jesse in our ceramics studio, exploring fiber arts as part of the larger studio, and living in the beautiful but somewhat remote driftless area in the southwest of Wisconsin in the midst of 80 acres of restored prairie and mixed hardwood forest.   On any given day I saw more deer and wild turkeys (or their tracks) than people.  It was quite the experience for a city girl like me, and I loved it.  I loved disappearing into the woods for hours at a time, coming home as darkness fell with a camera filled with moments of discovery and awe and wonder.

We didn’t have TV let alone cable, and our main connection to the outside world was through our internet connection, which fortunately was more than adequate.   I was working part time as a waitress in Madison, which was a perfect social outlet and flexible job to have as the orders in the studio waxed and waned.

But alas, it couldn’t last forever.  The economic downturn combined with some personal and family issues led to us having to make some difficult decisions.  I chose to go back to school, and we packed up our ceramics equipment, put it in storage, and moved to a farmhouse outside of Whitewater in late 2008.  I began school in 2009, studying education, business and biology, along with a fair number of electives that I couldn’t resist.  Moving houses is always challenging for me.  I’m definitely somewhat of a creature of habit, and when my surroundings change I have known myself to feel a bit disoriented and more than a little overwhelmed.   It took me around a year to really settle in and make myself at home in the old farmhouse.

Losing the access to nature, especially the complex biodiversity that had surrounded me out in the country, felt like a blow to the gut, as I craved that grounding energy more and more as the stress of the move washed over me.   It’s said that when God closes a door, he opens a window.  And so I became a passionate gardener, starting seeds in the dark months of March, ordering seeds from bright catalogues, and studying medicinal herbs, native plants, and permaculture principles.  It wasn’t the same as the garden that Mother Nature had planted, but it was an outlet that provided me the opportunity to interact with the world outside my window, and I welcomed it.

I simultaneously felt myself drawn increasingly to studying environmental biology and conservation at school.  Although I had read Aldo Leopold before my experiences in Blue Mounds, reading the familiar passages resonated deep within me unlike before, echoing with my time spent lost in the woods and clearings.

And it wasn’t too long before an opportunity presented itself for me to work at an urban farm practicing aquaponics.   Aquaponics is the raising of fish and vegetables in a system that recirculates the water between the fish, who put wastes into the water, and plants, who uptake the wastes out and use them as fertilizer  (there are  a lot more steps involved and I could go on for hours, but for the purpose of this update I’m keeping it brief).  Once again, I’d be working with Jesse in a business that I believed in, and as much as I didn’t want to shake things up, I couldn’t turn it down.

We commuted an hour each way to work for a while before deciding to look for a house to buy in Milwaukee.  I really didn’t want to move again, especially with my garden beds just getting established, but at the time it seemed like the best option, since the drive was getting old fast and we were doing work in a field that we believed was going to be a good long term career path.  So we took the leap, found a cute little cape cod with a generous fenced back yard and signed the papers (after 4 scheduled closings…. long story).   I was actually relieved to be signing on for a 30 year mortgage, given my dislike of moving.  I was ready to settle in.

Then, a bunch of negative stuff happened at work.  I won’t go into it here, but suffice it to say that there were significant mismanagement issues and financial instability ensued.   Jesse and I both found ourselves without our salary for weeks at a time.   Pets got sick and passed on, our stress level skyrocketed, the painting and other homemaking projects got sidelined, and we hunkered down into survival mode.  We tried to ride things out at work, but decided that we couldn’t stay any longer due to the ongoing issues and we both left in spring of 2011.

Since that time, we’ve been building our own business.  It’s been a long and continuously stressful process but I do believe in what we’re trying to do and after going through several stages of processing I now am at peace with where we’re at.  It’s a messy, unpredictable, beautiful, precious, straining, and rewarding time.  I’m pushing my boundaries, learning new skills and rediscovering strengths buried deep within.  Up until a couple of weeks ago, the stress of it all was kicking my butt, despite my best efforts to meditate, exercise, eat nutritious food – you name it.   Days flew by, filled with to-do lists that never got knocked out despite long days and endless hours of work, progress was hard-fought, and moments of joy were hard to come by.

Things are better now.  I’m practicing mindfulness meditation – trying to remember this is all very exciting if I can just let go of the death grip I feel like I have to maintain in order to keep things from spiraling out of control.   The perspective I’ve gained from this has really slowed time down and made me realize how important being in the NOW really is, even if things are far from certain and financially secure and all of that, there really is so much in my life to be grateful for.  And despite how much time and energy the business needs, I realize now that I have to set some time aside for myself and for settling into my new house.  It’s such a relief to experience a bit of enthusiasm for house projects as the impact of the stress from the change is fading.

I have many projects to update this blog with from the past couple of years.   At the worst of this stress storm, I had little energy or enthusiasm for anything, even my fiber arts, but that is getting better.    I’ve joined a weekly knitting group, and I’m pushing myself to make time for the projects that really interest me.   I’m so grateful that even though my budget is practically zero for such things, I’ve built up quite the spinning stash and I have more than enough supplies to weather this.

So, in conclusion, here’s to 2012 – and more frequent updates from me!

Have you ever started a spinning project full of enthusiasm which easily carries you through the transformation of the fiber into singles, just to run out of interest when it comes time to ply?

I have a somewhat fickle brain when it comes to longer-term projects requiring a sustained effort, especially if there is little challenge or visual/tactile interest.  I think that’s why I am always trying new techniques and pushing the limits of my skill set.  It’s also why I don’t spin large quantities of solid colors. I can tell you with a large degree of certainty that if I ever make a sweater out of handspun yarn, it will be multicolor!

I came to these conclusions today after finally finishing plying my latest spinning project, 600 yards of laceweight bluefaced leicester spun from top I hand painted in a sunrise/sunset colorway several years ago. It was so easy for me to sit down at my wheel and spin the singles – the beautiful colors slowly transitioning and layering onto the bobbin in amazing gradations was so visually rewarding.  After the singles were spun, I found myself starting to lose interest in the project. The completed bobbins sat neglected for nearly a month.

I decided to begin plying about two weeks ago. It was fun, at first. I was really pleased by how the colors lined up and with the way the twist made the sheen of the fiber pop. But then it all started to look the same and I let it hibernate again, until last night when I decided I was just going to power through and get it over with!

I treadled like a maniac (note to self, use super-highspeed whorl when plying laceweight next time) and got it done. And I am so happy that I did! The yarn is beautiful, and I feel a lot better knowing that I wasn’t off in my perception of the yardage.

Pictures of the yarn will have to wait until daylight, but I will make sure to post them.

I’m finding my thoughts drifting more and more to fibery pursuits lately.  I think a good part of it is my brain protesting the amount of information being shoved its way and dreaming of the meditative quietness of spinning as a reprieve.  In any case, I’m considering adding another wheel to the family – something quiet, (so I can spin while watching TV with the boyfriend), preferably double treadle (all my wheels now are single treadle) and I’m thinking an upright or castle-style wheel would balance out my collection nicely.  We’ll see about a new wheel after I get my plans for summer employment ironed out. 

This school stuff is worthwhile, I must remember.  And summer break isn’t too far away!

Back to work with me…