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.

Happy New Year

I have a relaxing day off so thought I’d get caught up on our blog. Yesterday, we had a weaving workshop with Robyn, the intern coordinator. There’s a couple more specific things I want to learn, while I’m still here, and weaving is one of the them. This is a rigid heddle loom, which when you hear someone say it to you for the first time sounds like rigid kettle. That’s what happened when Sister Ruth said I should start out on a rigid heddle loom to learn about weaving. Since I heard “kettle”, I’m thinking what kind of a silly name is that….of course a kettle is rigid. It wouldn’t hold water otherwise. After she spelled it for me, and I stopped laughing my head off, I got it. So Robyn taught us how to weave. A really cool thing Robyn said about weaving is that when you think way back to stone age times, weaving is like the earliest form of artistry or craftsmanship that existed. The men were hunters, the women cooked and someone did weaving to provide the basics of clothing (loin cloths would have been a really easy thing to weave….like a mug rug on a string…LOL.
I found that little history lesson really cool…all primal and such. There is a whole language that goes with weaving. Warps and wefts, heddles and shuttles. And the terminology has stuck since those stone age days….no evolution into newer words. It seems to take more time to set the loom up than it does to actually weave something but it’s really fun. The rigid heddle loom comes in different widths and the smaller ones, like this one, folds up and goes in a carrying bag. It sits on your lap when you use it and you see results really quickly, unlike crocheting. I started weaving this scarf around 3:00 p.m. and had it done by bedtime, with several breaks during that time. Now, I don’t know how to take it off the loom or finish the edges yet but I had a blast doing it. There is a workshop coming up at the end of this month, called Fiber Frolic and it’s a 3 day event. You can choose to learn spinning, weaving or Nuno felting. I will probably participate…just not sure which one I want to focus on. I can learn to spin from Robyn or Candace and most definitely want to before I leave here. I might do the Nuno felting because no one else does that here and it looks really cool. Here’s a short video so you can see what it’s about. I’m not sure I care to learn how to weave on the huge looms here cause I don’t ever see myself getting something that big if I wanted to do it on my own. The rigid heddle size of loom seems to be my speed.

  Right before Christmas, White Violet Center had an Open House for last minute shoppers. At 3:00 p.m. the drawing was held for the alpaca rug and alpaca teddy bear that raffle tickets had been sold for. I was really hoping to win the alpaca rug but I did win the teddy bear. I had felted a bracelet for Linda so I packed up the teddy bear, bracelet and the felted soap I had made and sent it to Linda for Christmas. She loved it and named the bear Hootie….my nickname. Hootie is keeping her company until I get to see her again in about 7 weeks time. She sent me a great tree of life necklace, along with a care box of all sorts of things.
Speaking of alpacas, Mariah is not doing well. About a week ago, she got so she couldn’t stand up on her own so we have to help her get up. That’s driven my back a little crazy, which I’ve been surprised that lugging hundreds of pounds of veggies hadn’t hurt it up until now. The weekend that I was on duty I had to move her (pick her up and help her keep her balance) to a new part of the pasture a couple times throughout the day so the ice pack I have with me, was my best friend for a couple days. Tracy has ordered some different vitamins and such to see if that will help improve function to her rear legs. Anything is worth a try at this point !
Not much going on in the greenhouse or gardens. The pea shoots, micro greens, lettuce mix, chard and kale are growing great in the greenhouse. The indoor farmer’s market starts this Saturday, in Terra Haute, but I’m not sure if we’ll have enough stuff to take. We shall see….
Seven weeks to go till Linda comes to get me. As a full-time RV’er, we spend 24/7 with each other so when we’re apart for 6 months, it’s really hard. We try to Skype when our devices are working ok (her tablet hasn’t been taking a charge lately) but having a conversation that way isn’t the same as sitting across the table from each other and not having interruptions and talking about “stuff”. It will be great to see her and share all the details of what I’ve been doing and show her how things are done with the projects I’ve been working on.
Linda had a great time at her son’s house, for Christmas, in spite of our car breaking down on the way up there and the fact that she was sick. Turned out the battery needed to be replaced in the car (way better outcome than the alternator we thought it was) so that has now been replaced. Linda is still sick but it may take a while for her to kick this viral infection she has. There’s nothing she can do for it….it’s just gotta run its’ course.
Well…that’s all the news that’s fit to print for this go round. Wishing a blessed 2014 to all our friends and readers of our blog. If you’re reading this and we haven’t met you yet, we’ll see you “down the road”. Happy New Year !