Linda Arrived !

It wasn’t a quick fix to get the steps on the rig so they would retract. Nothing, that $425 won’t fix. The motor that runs the steps going in and out was shot. It didn’t have very much power so it had to be replaced. They ordered the new motor on Monday and it came in on Tuesday morning. Linda also noticed that there are several cracks in the fiberglass and the RV guys said sometimes that happens in the cold winter weather. What’s with that ?!? Not happy at all about that and today I looked and there are even more from her drive out here. Not acceptable for a rig that is 28 months old ! I will be contacting Thor about that.
Linda got on the road about 11 a.m. on Tuesday and kept on driving until she arrived here a little after 10 p.m. It was so great to see her. We got the rig settled in the back parking lot and Boomer is staying over in the White Violet Center, in Tracy’s office. She has a dog bed in there and he’s happy as a clam. We go over and spend a lot of time with him in the evening and work on fiber projects.
On Tuesday, Linda jumped right into learning all sorts of stuff. She’s learned how to skirt fiber, how to felt soap, how to wind the yarn I spin and put it into a ball of yarn or make it into a skein. She’s made some felted items, using the cookie cutter molds and is getting three batts of fiber ready (which means she knows how to card fiber too) so Sister Moe can show her how to wet felt a hat.

Felting Soap

Winding Yarn

Winding a skein of yarn

She is a fast learner and says she is having lots of fun. Today we went to the barn and helped Tracy do chores. She learned how to scoop alpaca poop and feed them. I have my last morning alpaca duty tomorrow so she will work with me all morning and then we’re going on a field trip out to the guy’s farm who bought a bunch of White Violet’s alpacas. It’s time to trim their toes and give them their deworming shot. BTW we got the preliminary necropsy report and Mariah did have the meningeal worm. She also had pneumonia and something going on with her spleen. Now they know what they are dealing with as they head into springtime weather and the possibility of lots of slugs this summer. It’s scary that four alpacas here were affected by this and Tracy has heard of several other area farms who have had the same thing with some of their alpacas.

Linda’s trying to learn lots more by the end of the week and then we leave here on Saturday. Coming down the home stretch….5 more work days to go and then we’ll be hitting the road again !

The Circle of Life

Today was my last evening shift of checking on the alpacas before I leave White Violet, on the 22nd. Sadly, Mariah has not improved and Tracy has decided that it would be best for Mariah to be put down since she can’t live the way an alpaca should be able to live. The vet will come on Monday and put her to sleep and then she will be taken to Purdue so a necropsy can be performed to find out the cause of her illness. Today her body temperature has been low and you can tell that she doesn’t feel well. She isn’t eating or drinking and is pretty lethargic; just laying in her stall and not moving around at all. Tonight I put her on a heated dog pad to try and make her more comfortable and it did raise her body temp a tiny bit from early this afternoon when I checked it. I hope that she leaves this life on her own terms before Monday and will find Schroeder in a grassy field somewhere over the rainbow bridge where they can run and play. She needs to be at peace after being sick for a while now.
This afternoon was the nuno felting workshop. It was a lot of fun. To get started, lay a long piece of bubble wrap (bubbles facing up) on a table. The first step is to take a piece of silk and lay out the fringe pieces on each end, letting about 1.5” overlap onto the silk.





I chose black silk and purple for my accent color. Next, you take your fiber in wispy little sections and cover the silk, extending over the sides of the fabric and onto the fringe (all of the elements need to felt together so that is why you overlap onto the fringe). You want to make sure the whole thing is covered but you can’t lay it on too thick or it won’t felt together.



Then the accent color is laid on; again in wispy streaks on the fiber, making sure to go out onto the fringe to make it all cohesive. Using warm water and a tiny bit of Dawn, in a squirt bottle (see in the foreground), wet down the project using zig zag motions up and down the table.





Lay another piece of bubble wrap (bubbles facing towards the fabric) on top. Wet the top of the bubble wrap and rub gently to start the felting process. Remove the bubble wrap and fold in your sides to make a nice straight edge. Rub a little bit more to help felt it. Gently fold it all up and flip it over. Cover the blank side of the silk with wispy pieces of fiber, not worrying about the edges since you covered those on the front side. Put your accent colors on again to cover the backside.
Wet the top of the fabric and place the bubble wrap over it and wet that down. Start to rub the surface and check again to see how your edges look.
Now you take a rolling pin or a piece of swimming pool noodle and roll your project onto it. After about 150 rolls inside a towel (to catch all the water that comes running out from inside), it’s almost done. Twenty throws onto the table and then you head to the sink to rinse the soap out of your newly felted scarf. Some tying of the fringe and steaming to finish it off and you’ve got the finished product.

It’s hard to see the coloring on mine (on the left) but you can see how pretty Cindy’s turned out. Cindy is a Methodist minister, from Minnesota, who is here until March. She works with the alpacas and wants to go back to Minnesota and create a farm where non-violent offenders, who are released from prison, can learn new skills and become productive citizens again upon their release from jail. She’s learning to spin yarn with me and wants to learn how to weave too.
The scarf is so lightweight, only weighing around an ounce and it makes a gorgeous, wispy accent piece to wear. Our instructor makes material and creates jackets, using nuno felting, and sells them for $900. Scarfs, like we made today, sell for $60. It was another neat craft to learn about and I’m glad I got to attend the workshop since it filled up so quickly. They have enough people on a waiting list to run another workshop soon. Debby, the instructor, currently has 98 alpacas on her farm and she dyes a lot of her fiber and uses it in all of her projects. Wow, that would be a lot of alpacas to care for, shear and deal with the fiber (keep in mind you get two bags of fiber each time you shear. A blanket fleece and the 2nds so that’s almost 200 bags each spring when she shears.)
Cindy and I continue to spin and this week we learned how to ply two balls of yarn together. Here’s Cindy taking a skein and making it into a ball of yarn so it can be plied. I can’t wait to make something out of the yarn I’ve spun. The initial yarn, when you learn to spin, is chunky and often referred to as “art yarn” since we were inexperienced when we did it. Once you refine your spinning skills, you can get the strand pretty thin and much more consistent. I find it very therapeutic to spin but don’t think I’d ever buy a spinning wheel due to the price and space they take up. I’m still hoping to get a loom at some point but want to work with it some more to decide the size that would be best for us.
Time for bed…so anxious for Linda to get here with the rig so I can see her. It’s been 4 long months since I last saw her ! She was going to leave Sunday morning but this afternoon she couldn’t get the steps to retract so she has to take the rig back to the RV shop Monday morning and hope it’s a quick fix so she can get on the road. Hopefully she’ll still get here on Tuesday….please pray that she has safe travels from Pennsylvania to Indiana.

Spinning

Last week I learned how to spin so I’ve been working on trying to get the technique down. Although Candace told us not to look at the yarn we’re producing (Cindy is learning with me too), Candace said that it looks good. Here is a picture of the loom room. My spinning wheel is the one on the left. We moved the spinning wheels into this room because we needed to get them out of the way for an Alpaca 101 class that they held yesterday. They had a great turnout for the class…one of the attendees came from five hours away. So, I continue to work on my spinning technique so I can create my first skein of yarn.
I finished weaving another scarf. Here is where we trim the fringe and lay our items to dry, after washing them. This area is in the same room as the looms.

This is a commercial loom that someone donated to the center although I’ve never seen anyone work on it. The building where all of these looms are located is in the back of the White Violet Center and it used to be the laundry for the sisters. All of the items would come here to be washed in a commercial laundry area. All of the equipment was ripped out and the sisters are now responsible for doing their own laundry. There are two laundry areas on each floor in the building where I live, as do many of the sisters. One of the sisters must be responsible for putting out fresh towels in the rest rooms cause if I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, there’s a fresh towel there. I swear there’s a towel fairy that works hand in hand with the tooth fairy, making evening rounds. 

“Seconds” of fiber, from the skirting process that are located in the fiber room.




The skirting table and the bare shelves where “blankets” of fleece are usually kept. We have all of White Violet’s blankets done. We’re now working on some fiber that was donated to the center. We spend a lot of time on snowy days, sitting around this table skirting fiber.

The brick building, on the right, is the White Violet Center. You can see the smoke stacks of the big furnaces for the complex in the background and the steeple of the church in the left corner.

Sister Ruth was hired to do a portrait of a family’s pet donkey. This was done by felting fiber onto a wet felted base material. She did an awesome job making it look just like the photo that they sent.

I’ve entered two photos into the National Alpaca photo contest. Once all of the entries are in (deadline is 2/18), then I believe the photos all go up on the web for folks to vote on them and the ones with the most votes, from each category, will be printed and sent to Harrisburg, PA (how appropriate that the contest will be back home) to be on display at the National Conference this year and a judge will pick the winner in each category. Wish me luck !!
Not much else going on. I’m on “close” duty this week so in another hour I’ll be going out to check the alpacas water, hay, minerals and condition of the animals. We check to make sure they are all set for the night and Mariah will need to have her physical therapy where we hoist her up with the sling and pulley and exercise her back legs while the weight is off them. She didn’t do so well with it this morning, not wanting to stand at all or put weight on her legs. Hopefully she’ll do better this afternoon.
I think it was last week that I had a really profound and powerful moment, as I was sitting in my room. I was working on the pink scarf on the loom and looked over at my bed. When I packed stuff to come here, I packed an afghan that my grandmother had given me many years ago that means a lot to me. I brought it in case it was cold in my room. On top of that blanket I also have a small lap blanket that my mom made recently because I was freezing a few months ago when the weather started to get colder and I couldn’t get warm. I also have the shawl, that you’ll recall my sister made for me that I wear around my shoulders when it gets chilly. I saw all of these things that great women in my family have made for me and it really struck me (it’s making me cry just to write about it). As hard as my grandmother and my mother tried to teach me, as a kid growing up, how to crochet or do “crafty types of things”, I could never “get it”. Back then my fine motor skills were way better than they are now. I seem to be all thumbs and have no coordination at all now and I’m not sure what that is all about. But I have learned to weave and I’m learning to spin and I’ve learned to felt and I felt a really strong connection to these wonderful women in my life that have done this stuff for so long. Pardon my pun but I felt like a fiber had connected all of us with a commonality that I’d never felt before. It was a strong epiphany for me in that moment and something I will always cherish about what the people here have taught me and given to me.
I hope your week is a powerful one and one full of inspiration and love ! May you find a connection to something new or rekindle a connection to something forgotten. Make the most of the week in front of you.