Strap Yourself In - It's Gonna be a Long Ride

Sometimes life gets in the way of blogging, but I still feel the need to catch up here, as this is the story of our crazy world... The celery is coming along. And the Chicken Tractor is getting closer to completion. This mobile chicken house will be home to our birds when they are old enough to live outside the brooder. We have some brown egg layers and blue egg layers coming May 7.

The freezer got cleaned out and reloaded with a half of a steer from the farmer down the road.

You get a lot of ground beef when you get a half steer...

Took three of the girls to the Virginia Classic Alpaca Show in Lexington, Virginia.

The white one on the left took Grand Champion, for which we are excited, humbled and grateful. In addition to the pretty purple ribbon, she was "in the money" again this year...and that helps buy feed.

Took a trip to Gurdy Run Fiber Mill above Harrisburg to drop off a load of fiber for further processing.

They had a cute bottle lamb...

Beautiful Gypsy Cobb horses...

Good friends came along with their fiber and let me take blurry photos of them...

Other friends hid behind their latest knitting project...

And they had big machines to process our clip.

But taking much of our time recently has been the hand processing of fiber here. It is not always economically feasible to have everything processed at the mill. Some things a mill does better; and some things like blending colors or other fibers in small quantities are better done here.

We left off last month with the skirting, washing and drying that took place in the dining room. I've heard that some people actually eat meals in their dining room. Once the fleece is dry it is ready to be picked. This medieval torture device is a picker. It opens up the locks of fiber and gets it ready to be carded. It has hundreds of razor sharp spikes on the top and bottom. Dangerous. Ask me how I know.

Here the fiber has been fed into the picker and the pendulum swings back and forth, grabbing fiber from one end and flinging it out of the other into an awaiting cardboard box...

Then I measure two ounces of fiber on my scale because that's all the picker will take at one time and make an attractive roving or batt. One time, I put four ounces in and the batt looked like Cousin It from the Adams Family.

This is an electric carder. This expensive piece of equipment is owned by three farms who have sworn to keep it clean and operating. It is the Sisterhood of the Traveling Carder. Sure, you can use hand carders, but it would take forever.

Fiber is fed into one end of the carder and it is pulled through and onto the large drum. Thousands of little teeth grab the fiber and pull it into the same direction. This way all of the fiber is aligned so it is easy to spin.

Periodically, you run this burnishing tool (also full of sharp teeth) across the top of the large drum to improve the quality of the batt and pack it down a little.

Once all of your fiber has been fed into the carder it is time to pull your batt or, in this case, roving. You use this pick to bring up a section of the batt.

Then you pull it through this little plastic thing called a diz.

And there you have it. Roving. Keep doing this until all of the batt is off the drum

Finished product. Two ounces of 100% Alpaca Roving. (Shameless plug...Available now at my Etsy store... www.SturdyWelshWoman.etsy.com)

Here is alpaca blended with hand dyed Blue Face Leicester sheep (an ounce of each).

And here is some in green (also made some in yellow and rose).

So there ya have it. The month in review. Shearing, more shows, and babies coming soon.