February '10 Canadian Fibre Box
Happy belated Valentine's everyone! This month's box is pure
luxury, so consider it a Valentine's day present to yourself. One of our
local fibre experts recommended I contact Princess Farms, and I'm sure
happy that I did. The box of fibre that arrived this week is gorgeous,
and was a dream to put into this month's shares. One last word:
We've sold out yet another month! Thank you all for supporting the
project. The more we support "local" producers, the more we "grow" the
Canadian fibre community.
Princesss
Farms is our main feature this month. Located in Saskatchewan, Princess
Farms has cashmere goats, alpacas (Huacaya and Suri), and one Suri
llama. Really, truly, pure Canadian luxury. Jo, Princess Farms'
shepherdess, began her adventure in August 2005 with 12 cashmere goats
and a few livestock dogs. Soon after, their first Alpaca followed. The
rest is history, and the results are in this month's Canadian Fibre Box.
A
few notes about Cashmere that you might not know. The best quality
cashmere is hand brushed from the goats when they are "ripe", so that
the guard hairs stay on the goat and only the downy soft cashmere is
removed. A single goat produces only about 4-6 ounces of cashmere before
processing! Cashmere is so fluffy that you can do a lot with just a
single ounce of it. It is great blended with other fibres, especially
fine wools such as merino and rambouillet, and other luxury fibres such
as alpaca and buffalo. Jo and Princess Farms, thank you for sharing
these special fibre with us!
To order more,
please contact Jo.
(Photos are sourced from Princess Farms' website)
One of the fun parts of this project is browsing Etsy for
artisans to include in the Box. This month I found
Sqwish's shop on Etsy, who had
also
found me, and invited her to share some yarn. You each have some yummy
Cuddle Toes in your box, and you can get more from her shop if your toes
are calling for it. Sashka also has a blog with great patterns here:
sqwish.wordpress.com. (Photo from Sqwish's Blog).
Share your projects
Come
join us on
Ravelry at the Ottawa
Valley Fiber Arts group, to share your projects and ideas! If you
haven't joined Ravelry yet, it's free
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