Northern California Angora Guild: 3/17/19

Maureen and John are Puppysitters

March 23 is the National Puppy Day. Maureen shares with us some puppy pictures.

Maureen says,

See what we got to play with for a few days! These are the Border Collie puppies. Their human mom is occupied by some family emergency so we get to puppy sit.

This is the doggy mom and her pups.

The doggie mom and her babies again.

Maureen helps to burp the pup and …

… clean the little butt. Maureen says, "Their human mom will be coming shortly. It's really kind of fun and a bit of hard work when they are not ours. We are sorta like the grandparents!

John is a great helper to the pups too. John is an agility competitor and instructor, he could see the potential of these little smarties when they grow up.

Carol's Dye Project

Carol handspun this skein of two ply yarn, one ply is white French Angora and one ply of Merino. Carol describes how she approach the "speckled dyeing" as following:

I soaked the skein in water plus vinegar. The water barely covered the yarn, then I randomly sprinkled dye powder using plastic spoon, using ruby red and orange. I also dipped a plastic fork in blue and purple dye solution and touched yarn.

I covered pan with plastic wrap and microwaved on high for 3 minutes two times, allowing yarn to cool for 3-5 minutes in between.

I rinsed the yarn, only a tiny bit of color came off.

I finished rinsing the yarn.

The yarn is being dried.

Another view of the dry yarn.

Finished dry yarn. I was aiming for less color and more white but I think sprinking dye with a spon resulted in too much dye. The yarn still is very pretty.

In case you wonder what kind of dye powder that I used, here they are.

Duo Duo Solo

We are lovey dovey siblings, we share a lovely bed.

We still love each other but the bed is too small for both of us.

I am flying solo.

Pretty in Red and Pink

Got some leftover red and pink yarns from other projects, so I spun up some white Angora and dyed it pink.

Finished fingerless mittens, how do you like them?

Clean Fawn

When we breed for fawn, the goal is to get it as "clean" as possible. The above is an English Angora junior, the color is as clean as it could be.

"Clean" means that there's very little or preferably no black or gray tips on the face or the wool. The traditional thought is that the presence of the "wide band" gene would clean out the black or gray tips. However, the fawn/cream/red are classified as "Wide Band Group" in the SOP, then listed as faults: "Any smut, ticking, ear lacing, or faint grayish band in wool". My thought is that if they are all wide band and that wide band gene could clean out the smut and gray, then there should not be such faults. How to explain the clean vs smut fawn (and cream and red)? In my opinion it's the B- or bb gene that determine the appearance.

In tort, the regular or black tort is aaB-C-D-ee, chocolate tort is aabbC-D-ee. The difference in color is that the black tort has a dark face and "Wool is to be dark fawn over the back", in most cases the wool has darker tips, while chocolate tort has a brown face and "Wool is to be fawn over the back". (the quotation marks are used because these are the words used in the SOP). That sounds almost like the smutty fawn and fawn except that tort and chocolate tort are self aa while the fawns are agouti A-. Therefore in my opinion, the smutty fawn is just the agouti version of the black tort and the clean fawn is the agouti version of the chocolate tort.

Smutty fawn: A-B-C-D-ee

Clean fawn: A-bbC-D-ee

In order to breed clean fawn, the best way to achieve the goal is to use two chocolate based fawn or a chocolate based fawn bred with a chocolate tort.