Growing Fibers

My flax is blooming! Can’t wait to experiment.

My cotton is sprouting! The white and tan anyway, the green is not doing so well. I’ve been told that our area is not hot enough for cotton, but I’m hoping that is ‘not hot enough for production farming’, and I will still get at least *some* mature bolls. One is in a pot on my patio, which will hopefully pump up the ambient temperature, but obviously not the intensity of the sun. We are experimenting!

And serendipitously someone at our school had too many silkworms, so we ended up with a box of the curious creatures. Did you know that if you put silkworms in an open box with some mulberry leaves they WILL NOT LEAVE? What is up with that? I think it is a little bit creepy. They are so highly domesticated that even in their moth form, they will not fly out of the box! Crazy. And not completely true, when our silkworms started looking for places to spin their cocoons they were more willing to venture *slightly* out of the box. Possibly I haven’t properly enriched their environment? One made it all the way across the kitchen counter, my husband named him Marco Polo. Ours are almost all cocooning now, and their cocoons are yellow! Apparently white is recessive, but ours come from a long line of school caterpillars, I’m guessing they are more bred for hardiness than silk color! The best thing about this fiber journey is I am learning SO MUCH! Awesome. I think I need to learn about weaving grass too, I want to take the kids back to the dawn of weaving. Can you dye grass with liquid watercolors? SO MANY QUESTIONS! So fun.

So now I have three out of the four major natural fibers growing in and around my house. I want to know, where are my sheep?

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we are considering sheep, but we need a barn! (i don’t think you have room!!!) maybe the Little Prince’s breed? maybe a persian cat?
lovely blue flax…. there’s lots of info on flax processing at the Historical Society; everyone used it long ago, but it’s alot of work. i agree, fiber technology is fascinating!

Yes, sadly I have no plans whatsoever of actually acquiring any sheep. I will have to be content with loaners at Hidden Villa.

Love your site. Just a FYI, the reason that the silk worm cocoons were yellow is that to get white, you have to feed them white mulberry leaves only.

I raised 2 sheep on 1/2 acre in a small village 20 miles outside NYC. They were sheltered over night in 1/2 of our old wooden single car garage that had an outside pen area if we needed to corral them. Our lawn was filled with clover and rye but they were supplemented with hay and feed. We used them as lawn mowers during the spring & summer and leaf eaters in the fall. [We had lots of sweet Maple trees and the large oak acorns were their gum balls] Used a small battery operated Australian portable electric fence to partition the lawn as needed. The Girls even moved with us to Florida. Had a grey Border Leister for the long wool and a Horned Dorset for the springy medium white wool for dyeing and mixing. They were part of local Montessori school walking field trips. We bribed them with sweet feed to get them to go where we wanted them too. And, to retrieved them if they escaped into the neighborhood.

Thanks, that’s interesting. I’ve read that yellow is the genetically dominant color, and assumed that if you don’t throw out yellow sports after a certain number of generations everyone is going to end up yellow. Have you raised silk worms and controlled the color by their diet?

I think it would be fun to have sheep, although I imagine it would necessitate a relationship with an animal dr. too. Unfortunately we live in a relatively urban area and possess only about 10’x30′ of grass. That and our lot backs up against two motels, and I suspect they might object. My parents-in-law live in a wonderful place for sheep though, I just need to convince them. 🙂

Get some angora rabbits! They’re like mini sheep and soooo soft! They need their fur blow dryered out 3 times a week to prevent mats

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