Adopt An Alpaca

Attention all would-be farmers, ranchers and shepherds at heart! If you’ve wanted to own fiber producing livestock, but your situation doesn’t allow for them, you can now adopt an alpaca for your very own for a cost of $200 per year. This $200 will be used here on the farm to pay for feed, water, shearing, and vet costs for 12 months.

Alpacas are walking miracles. They are gentle in temperament and highly intelligent, with huge dark eyes and expressive faces that will completely disarm you. They produce a luxury fiber that is prized for it’s warmth, amazing softness and drape in every fiber preparation from knitting to weaving to felt making. Our alpacas are a combination of Chilean and Peruvian bloodlines that produce soft fleeces in dark and rich colors; blacks, medium to dark browns, and grays, with a few whites thrown in for variety. We have male and female breeding stock, non-breeding males, young weanlings, and 10 babies arriving in the fall.

Here’s what you will receive:

1. A framed picture of your alpaca.

2. A copy of the ARI registration certificate for your alpaca, showing the date of birth and genetic history of the animal.

3. Monthly reports concerning activity, breeding, diet, veterinary information and picture updates.

4. After our yearly spring shearing, you will receive the raw fleece, both the prime blanket and the seconds, which will be bagged separately. If the fleece is not acceptable, you will be given a similar fleece as a replacement.

5. Input into naming the offspring produced by your animal and first hand information concerning any breeding decisions made.

6. An open invitation to visit the farm and interact with your alpaca in person, as well as an invitation to shearing days and any shows attended.

7. The ribbons and awards won by your alpaca at any alpaca show or fleece show.

8. Knowledge that you are helping to support the small family farm and provide the board and care for an exquisite animal.

9. If you adopt a bred female, you can add the baby for only $50 for the first year and receive the fleece from it’s first full body shearing. This is the very best of the best in alpaca fleece!

10. If you decide to purchase livestock from us in the future, you will receive a 20% discount on the listed price of any animal on our farm or 25% off the price of your adopted animal.

Support fees are not refundable. This money will be spent for the costs of daily care for your animal. With the price of fuel at an all time high, all farm costs, including feed and water, are also at an all time high, so please take your commitment seriously. Your payment of support does not constitute ownership of the animal but entitles you to regular communications, ownership of the fleece, farm privileges, all awards, and advance information on anything pertaining to your animal.

In the event that your animal is sold or, God forbid, passes into the ether, you will be given another animal to love and care for. You may make that choice yourself or we will choose a similar animal for you. At the end of 12 months you may opt out of the program or choose a different animal.

Thank you for your support. You involvement means so much to us. My family lives on the eastern Colorado farm where I was born and where my parents farmed for 45 years. Traditional farming has become an exercise in futility and we are constantly looking for ways to preserve and pass on our heritage while maintaining our contribution to our community, both locally and nationally. We look forward to partnering with you as you endeavor to do the same.

You can find out more about us and view all of our animals available for adoption at www.alpacanation.com.

For sheep lovers, please go to adoptalambny.blogspot.com to see some gorgeous lambs at Maggie’s Farm.

Magical Felt with the Ranchers

There are loads of books out on felt these days. It seems like it's the new fashion craft of the season and there's little wonder. Making felt is an amazing and satisfying process. It's simple and straightforward, highly creative, and you really can't make a mistake.

Making felt is simply the process of matting and shrinking animal fiber together in a controlled fashion. Controlling the shape and rate of shrinkage are the keys to success. Felting can be done by an individual or in a gang, whichever fits your preferences or your needs.

My good friends at Triangle Cross Ranch will be helping us with this project. Since it's winter and most of the outside activities are either unpleasant or impossible because of the wicked wind and crushing cold, these folk are now bona fide experts in making felt--and they make felt as a gang.




OK, so, rule number one in making felt--there is no having fun or smiling. Absolutely NO fun!! Do you hear me?



Oh dear, I don't think they're listening.



To begin, we'll need either raw washed fiber, or carded batts. I think it's easier to use batts and I think the results are a little more even and predictable.


Lay down a piece of fabric as a base to build your felt upon. We use old sheer, but textured curtains. (Dotted Swiss or polyester lace is perfect, but make sure it's really ugly. That's important.) Next build your first layer of fiber by laying pieces like shingles on your fabric, with all the fibers going the same direction. To build the second layer, place the fiber perpendicular to the first layer. Do the same for the third layer and then check for holes or uneven spots, not heavier or lighter in places, but very evenly distributed. Place another piece of textured fabric on top of these layers.



Wet the fiber with hot soapy water...


...and press the water into all of the fibers under your fabric until they're saturated. The wet fibers will begin to smell like an animal and the people making the felt will wrinkle their noses and perhaps complain slightly. Those who thrive on texture and sensory activities will thrill to the feel of the soap and warm water, the smell of the fiber and the contrast between the rough fabric and the soft wool. It will calm them and they'll look forward to it week after week.



When all the fibers are wet, rub them gently in a circular motion so that none of the fibers shift from their positions. The amount of pressure is similar to the pressure you use to apply moisturizer to your face in the morning. Continue rubbing the entire surface until the fibers begin to hold together.



Keep rubbing... (...how much longer?)



turn it over and do the other side, and rub some more... (...my arms are tired...)



until you have what we call prefelt. (...are we done yet?)



Prefelt is when the fibers begin to mat together and it passes the "tent test". To test this, pinch a small bit of your fiber and pull up. If it forms a little tent, it's prefelted. Take off the top fabric and rub firmly and aggressively to shrink and harden the felt. We even scrub it on a washboard or a textured drainboard to firm it up.



Rinse in cold water. OK. Do you have felt? Is it fabric? Felt is, indeed, fabric. It may be thick or thin depending on how much fiber was used, but it's very durable--nearly indestructible. There are some details I've left out, like how much water and soap, but that's the gist of it.

We've recently been making our felt in larger and larger sheets by rolling it in a textured rug or mat and rolling it back and forth. It's absolutely magic the way it becomes felt in just a few short minutes. Place the fabric on top of a textured rug or mat (old bamboo blinds or outdoor mats are perfect). Build the layers on the sheer fabric as before, but you can now use larger pieces of fiber in building the layers. We use full sized batts for this. Put the sheer fabric on top.

Wet the fiber and press as before. After the fibers are all saturated, roll the entire works around a wooden dowel rod or a broom handle.



Rubber band it to hold it together and squeeze out the excess water.



NOW, roll, roll and roll some more.



Put on some music and dance and shuffle while you roll back and forth. If you get tired, sit down and roll it with your feet. Hook it to the back of your bike so it will roll as you pedal and let your bike do the work, but ROLL!



Unroll it, do the tent test, add color, and roll some more. Reroll if you need to, but it should be prefelted in no time. In this way, our Ranchers make prefelt in 15 minutes from building the layers to completed prefelt. It's absolutely brilliant and saves us loads of work.

We're learning to make mittens and bags out of our felt fabric and we're only getting started. We made our first three pairs of mittens three weeks ago out of some ugly cast off fiber by simply cutting the pieces out and hand stitching them together.




The Ranchers have been taking turns wearing them to do chores, even thought my oldest daughter thought she was going to have a pair for herself. So far, they're the warmest work gloves they have. Pretty good product testers, eh?

Just think, all this creativity and hard work without an ounce of fun, conversation, or silliness! Looks and sounds like a sweat shop to me...






...maybe not.

You can read more about Triangle Cross Ranch at www.trianglecrossranch.net or at
trianglecrossranchblog.blogspot.com

A New Recipe with a Dash Update

It's 11 F (-11 C) today and light snow is just starting to fall. Oh look, can you see Dash? He's peeking over the fence to see who's coming out to impose on his day and he's not even wearing his blankie. His mama (the big white girl) is letting him nurse now, after two weeks of spitting him off and generally treating him like an annoying stranger after his illness. I don't know if there's any milk left for him to have, but I don't think it matters. He's done so much better than either the vet or I expected, although he's really small and the weight gain is painfully slow. The gray baby is a full two months younger than he is and has had a growth spurt over Christmas. She makes him look like a squirt.

I just have to post a new recipe that I tried out. I found it in a book called "Soup and Bread", by Crescent Dragonwagon. I thought the author's name was a little strange, but the book is marvelous. With it being the frozen days of winter here, I was glad to find a book dedicated to two of my favorite types of winter foods and without a lot of the odd ingredients that are so fashionable, expensive and hard to find like kombu, daikon, kuzu, mahimahi, seitan, among many others--I don't even know what most of these are and doubt that my family would eat them even if I did. This book offers pure home cooking with some healthy and flavorful twists and I just love it.

My current favorite is called Supreme of Chicken and Olive Soup. I had never heard of putting olives in soup before and it sounded intriguing so I took the chance of my family refusing to eat a bite of it and wasting all the good ingredients. Results? Everyone loved it and it's now on our favorite list. I served it with hot baking powder biscuits and cold green salad.

So here is it is for your consideration and use. Enjoy!

Supreme of Chicken and Olive Soup Eureka

4 c. chicken or vegetable stock
1 c. dry white wine
4 tbsp butter
1 medium onion, diced
1 medium carrot, peeled and diced
1 rib celery diced
5 tbsp flour
1/2 c. peas
1 1/2 c. milk or half and half
1/2 c. cooked rice
1/4 c. pitted olives cut into fat rounds
1/4 c. pimento stuffed green olives, sliced into fat rounds
3 c. chunked cooked chicken
Salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

1. In a soup pot, combine the chicken stock and wine and boil. Turn down heat and simmer.
2. In a skillet, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the onion and saute until slightly softened. Add the carrot and and celery and saute, stirring, another 5 or 6 minutes.
3. Sprinkle the veg with flour and lower heat. Cook 2 minutes while stirring in the flour. Gradually stir in some of the stock mixture and then whisk in the thickened pan contents to the remainder of the stock. Simmer over very low heat for 20 minutes.
4. Add milk to soup. Add the peas along with the olives, rice, and chicken. Heat through and season to taste.

Pretty simple and basic--mostly just a home made cream of chicken soup. I used 2% milk and left out the peas (because my oldest son won't touch them) and added nearly three times the amount of olives. I also boiled the chicken and used the stock from that rather than purchasing actual chicken stock. Good luck and I hope you like this as much as we did.