It was a team effort

Posted on April 19, 2012 by cliffhousealpacas

For the most part, the kitties are content to limit their murderous tendencies to the mice that live in and around the barn. But Whisper has recently set his sights on larger prey.

"EEEEeeee!"

Derby’s eaten his share of these guys, but never the cats. Until Whisper found one living across the driveway from the barn, and decided that was too close. And if he couldn’t take one out, he knew who could.

Whisper: "I don't have Napoleon complex." Squeaky: "I could take out a medium-sized dog."

Mom watched as he scouted the burrow, and then went back into the barn. When he re-emerged, he was leading Mom’s mini-panther, Squeaky. Squeaky made short work of catching the thing, and then dragged it, still alive, into the barn. It was a little harder to control than their usual playthings, the mice, so at some point, it got away and made a break for it. Then Zip, our littlest and most timid cat, took some decisive action. With none of the usual dorking around, she pounced, and that was that.

Who ever said cats don’t hunt in packs?

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Fluffy white yarn

Posted on April 18, 2012 by cliffhousealpacas

Pillow soft and a creamy white, this yarn is my favorite of product of my almost painfully productive weekend. I’m calling it “Clouds Over Tuscany, Due” (“due” means two in Italian).

I spun it up as a medium-bulky weight yarn, which is unusual for me, because I know that it’s destined to be part of a blanket. I can think of nothing worse than trying to crochet a blanket in lace weight yarn.

I really, really like how it came out. It’s fluffy, luminous, and rub-your-face-in-it soft. I just wish I’d had decent light this morning while taking pictures, so I could show it off. The slight golden tinge reminds me of that lovely amber light I imagine bathes the Tuscan landscape.

Side note: The word “Tuscan” looks weird. For some reason, it looks like “Vulcan” to me. Probably because I am a nerd. So is WordPress, apparently. It doesn’t know the word “dye” but it does know “Vulcan”.

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Waste management

Posted on April 17, 2012 by cliffhousealpacas

Ever wonder where all that…er…”poo”…goes? No? Well, clearly you’ve never spent much time in a barn. Moving poo from pile to pile is like 90% of what we do everyday. We compost all the ‘paca and horse droppings, along with our yard waste, old hay and moldy hay. We move two wagons full of organic material to the compost pile every single day.

That's ONE of our two piles, the newer one. Dad is using the tractor to loosen up the older pile before we spread it.

We have two compost piles, the old one and the new one. We stopped adding to the old one last fall, to give it a chance to compost. Turning poo to compost is actually fairly easy. Microbes (bacteria and fungi) do all the hard work. We turn it over using the tractor once, since the moist and warm inside of the pile is the best environment for composting. By spring, we no longer have poo at all, just a REALLY big pile of yard-enhancing fertilizer. Dad calls it “Alpaca Gold”, since it still has a slight gold tinge from the sawdust.

After they loosen up the old pile, to make it easier to shovel, they fill up the little manure spreader that goes behind the tractor. Here, my Bro admires his handy work.

Well, with piles this big, you end up with rather more fertilizer than yard. Sometimes our friends want some, which might make a dent in it. But most of it has to be loaded by a hand into our teeny-tiny manure spreader.

Fertilizer, ho!

It’s like a wagon version of those hand crank fertilizer things people use in their yards. As you drive around, it spreads the compost behind you. Dad applies it to our pastures in thin, even layers. This year, the fam busted their behinds to get it out on the fields before the last snow, so the melt water would help the nutrients seep into the soil.

ZOOM. Nah, just kidding. It's more like "wrrrrrrr".

And the answer to your question is: no, it doesn’t smell. It’s full of earth worms and nutrients, and bears very little resemblance to poo, although you might get the occasional road apple (horse poo…not a variety of apple tree that grows in manure piles).

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Now THAT was a spinning marathon

Posted on April 16, 2012 by cliffhousealpacas

Over the weekend we were busy folks. Mom, Dad and the Bro had some manure adventures, which I’ll detail tomorrow, and I spun a whopping total of 621 yards of yarn. How many CSI episodes? Only 24. Twitch.

I haven’t got a name for this one yet. Something involving charcoal, perhaps? It’s a medium to lace-weight marled yarn. I created it by holding black roving and gray roving at the same time, and spinning evenly from both.

I think it came out rather well, though it’s very…busy. Next time, I think I’ll ply one marled single with one solid color single to calm it down a bit.

Tomorrow: our intrepid manure wranglers take on “the big pile”.

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Retroactive post: Merlin vs. Derby the dachshund

Posted on April 13, 2012 by cliffhousealpacas

A long time ago, in a ranch far, far away…actually, it was only last Christmas. But I’ve meaning to tell you about Derby the dachshund’s first interaction with the alpacas for a while now.

He's so sweet and innocent.

Derby-licious, aka Derbles, aka Dahbe, aka honey-lamb, aka sweetums, aka the little man, aka Teeny-Weenie, is my dog. He’s adorable, if I do say so myself. Now, we live by ourselves. It feels weird to admit that on the internet. So…we live by ourselves, with hulking, scary, gun wielding neighbors and a security system. Which is true (just ask the fire department, I accidentally called them with the security system last weekend).

Anyway, you might call the Derbs a bit possessive of my time. I live to serve him, in his opinion. When I spent so much of the Christmas holiday outside in the barn, he was understandably perturbed. So one morning I brought him out with us. The first thing he did was escape from the barn into the horse paddock, where he barked ferociously at the alpacas. The alpacas did not approve. Despite the presence of two fences between them and Derby, they were frankly convinced they were goners.

Threatening, right?

But Merlin wasn’t going down without a fight. While the others milled around wildly, he stood his ground, stomping and prancing around, trying to get a foot on Derby through the fence. This went on for about half an hour before we decided that was enough of that and Derby was deposited back in the house. For the rest of the day, all the alpacas gave me dirty looks. I don’t know how they knew I was associated with the little nuisance that had briefly threatened their very lives (ha), but they did. And Merlin went to sleep that night knowing that he had protected the herd from the greatest threat ever…

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YEEEAAAAAAHHHH!!! Dunn nunn nunn

Posted on April 12, 2012 by cliffhousealpacas

It looks like she…*puts on sunglasses*…spins a good yarn.

Yeeaaaahhh! Dunn nunn nunn *title credits roll*

Sorry, had a David Caruso/CSI Miami moment there. I normally spin by weight. I spin two ounces of a single on one bobbin, then two on another bobbin. Even when I am super careful about moving the yarn from hook to hook on the flyer, so that it winds on to the bobbin evenly, it’s kind of hard to tell just by eyeballing it whether or not I have the same amount of singles on the bobbin before I ply.

It's fairly evenly wound onto the bobbin. I am careful to move it from hook to hook often. If it gets uneven, I stop and unwind it. You don't HAVE to wind it on evenly, but some of us have these urges *twitch*

Unfortunately, I have no idea where the postage scale is. So I’ve switched to measuring how much yarn I’ve produced in easy time increments: number of CSI episodes watched per bobbin. As an example, let’s take the “Black Lace” yarn I just completed. It took me two episodes to spin one bobbin, and two episodes to spin the other. The next day, I added more twist by spinning each bobbin again (one episode per bobbin). Plying the whole thing took another two episodes. So let’s see…that’s 8 episodes at 43-ish minutes a pop…344 minutes or 5 hours 45 minutes. Not bad, for 215 yards of yarn!

And one more thing, to be clear: I don’t watch CSI Miami. That show is silly. I’m all about old school CSI or CSI New York (which are NOT silly…right? RIGHT??). Though, watching crime dramas might violate my “think happy thoughts while spinning” mantra. My first choice yarn name was actually “Black Dahlia”. I didn’t even mention that one to marketting (Mom).

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Yarn – Black Lace

Posted on April 11, 2012 by cliffhousealpacas

I finished my first batch of yarn using mill-processed roving! I’m calling it, for simplicity’s sake, “Black Lace”.

I haven’t “unboxed” my postage scale yet (in the words of the instructions that came with my spinning wheel), so I don’t know how many ounces of yarn I made. It is 215 yards, though, more than enough for a small project.

I will now grudgingly admit that working with mill processed roving is easier than using the stuff we card ourselves. It was consistent, tangle free, and clean. Ours is usually…clean. I feel kind of like those gourmet coffee drinkers that refuse to go to Starbucks. It’s easier, faster, and cheaper to use the mill, but without all that sweat, blood and tears, is the end product as nice?

Erm. Honestly, it might be nicer. Sweat, blood, and tears tend to goo up the yarn.

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Emergency preparedness

Posted on April 10, 2012 by cliffhousealpacas

Last week, I mentioned one of the wildfires burning in our area. There have been three already this season, though none of them were near enough to threaten us. Over Easter dinner, I talked with the family about the Ranch’s evacuation plan.

The math is simple. We have one trailer that holds 2 horses or 6 alpacas. We have 10 alpacas, 2 horses, 3 barn cats, and 2 dogs. To evacuate all the animals on the Ranch, we’d need to take three trips in our trailer, or recruit two other friends with trailers. As I mentioned in the comments before, Mom and her horse friends are on each other’s speed dial, and are ready to show up at each other’s places to evacuate at essentially any time.

We aren't in the trees or anything, so we'd be more concerned about a grass fire.

Now, it takes about 11 minutes to get from the Ranch to the county fair grounds. During emergencies that’s where everyone takes their livestock, since they already have pens and such. Lets give ourselves another 5 minutes to load the animals in the trailer, and 5 to unload at the fair grounds (which is being kind of optimistic, but one year the horses lived with our name braided into their hair so if we had to evacuate suddenly, we wouldn’t have to worry about losing them after unloading). If we were on our own completely, it would take us about an hour and a half to get everyone to safety. With help, we could probably do it in half the time.

The harsh truth is you can’t evacuate animals without lead time and sometimes you don’t have that. In sudden emergencies, such as tornadoes, the best thing to do is actually let the animals loose. Better to round them up from someone else’s land later than to trap them in a bad situation.

I’m looking for a positive note to end on here and not finding it, especially given the abysmal 80% success rate of reverse 9-1-1 calls telling people to evacuate during the recent fire. Pretty much the best I can do is this: we are prepared to do everything in our power to get the animals and ourselves to safety in an emergency. We can’t do anything else. I guess the rest is faith or fate.

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Spinning marathon

Posted on April 9, 2012 by cliffhousealpacas

There’s nothing like 5 big bags full of deliciously fluffy roving (that’s unspun, processed fiber) to get a girl spinning again. I started slow, since it’s been almost over a month (!) since I have done any spinning.

Eh. Not bad for someone who's been off the wagon for a while.

We have a ton of black roving from Brittany, so I just sat down with 2 pounds of it on the floor next to me, turned on a DVD and did a marathon spinning session. No thinking, no designing of elaborate master pieces, just spinning. One can never have too much black yarn, was my logic.

The single on the bobbin this morning.

Spinning from mill processed roving is, happily, not very different from spinning from our hand or drum carded roving. I don’t have to stop to join new fiber to work with, since the entire 30 ounces are all part of one long tube of roving, so I guess that’s convenient. I haven’t found a single nib or tangle yet, though I think that may be different for the other alpacas’ fiber. There’s no visible dust as I work with it, and I’ve only found two little pieces of grass after 4 hours of spinning. Oddly, it still leaves my hands black. Some of that dust must just be too deeply embedded to get out, no matter how you process it.

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Happy Friday from the cats

Posted on April 6, 2012 by cliffhousealpacas

A special message from the barn kitties: happy Friday!

Squeaky: "Why would I wish you a happy Friday? Every day is a Saturday for a cat." Whisper: "I see ghosts. Can't you see them? Run for your lives!"

Oh who am I kidding, the kitties don’t care about your weekend. Everyday is a weekend when you are a cat.

I’m headed down to the Ranch for Easter this weekend, so I’ll try to bring home some stories. I’m definitely going to bring home roving! Then I’m going to ignore the things that need to be done around the house for a few nights and spin.

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