Even though the bull was a tough act to follow as her holiday gift to NYC, Agata recently knit herself an apartment, literally.

Agata did this as an installation at the Christopher Henry Gallery, but it’s still livable as Curbed points out! Stay tuned for more updates on my yurt once the wool’s available as well as an upcoming book the yurt’s featured in!

A sheep made of cauliflower, olives and beans! I like it!

Now while that might look like a lot of batts this is JUST the beginning, there are hundreds of more pounds to go but this should allow me to make roughly 170 feet of 2.5 inch diameter cord – not a bad start!

In the meantime I thought I’d share this awesome picture of a knitted tree I saw a few weekends ago in Baltimore! It was outside of a yarn store and looked like the tree was quite warm. More to come on the wool progress as I get updates. So far no news is good news and there’s still another dose of Icelandic yet to be delivered!

Thrillist must have an app that lets you click what you should do with you life and they tell you! Very cool. Especially since they’re recommending that people live in a yurt, what an awesome directive to get! Shortly there after I got a photo in the mail from my client, Jerry, who thought of me on a business trip when he saw this sign.

Story of my life as you all well know. I’ve been a busy bee with the yarn lately as I’ve been trying to finish all of my rewards within a year! I know…it doesn’t sound very fast but I swear I’m working on them ALL the time! I should be able to be more productive now that Cady my yurtern is back in the mix – yay for helping hands. I’m not sure how I got so lucky on the friend and client front but keep the pictures coming!

Those are each bags of one kind of wool, either Dorset or Icelandic. As you can see they’re much cleaner than they were a few weeks ago! That’s because Jennifer over at Fiber Dreams in Temple, NH gave them all a good washing. The Icelandic turned out to have quite a bit of lustre to it, it’s very pretty! I really was shocked at how white they all came out.

We took that washed wool and laid out some Icelandic and some Dorset on the conveyor belt going into the picker. The picker then got out some more of the vegetative matter and fluffed it all up a lot. The funniest part about the picker is that it throws the wool into a room behind it that just looks like it has clouds blowing through it!

That is wool, post-picker, just laying on the floor after it flew through the air. We then sprayed it with water and conditioner so that it was ready for the carder, a huge machine with tons of rollers in it.

The image above is of the backside of the picker, that’s where the wool flies through into the room. I’m not sure if you can tell but there are some gnarly teeth on that roller!

Once the wool was well conditioned we laid it out on the conveyor belt into the carder, which is a slow machine that rolls the wool around in it 16 times and gets out more debris. Once it goes through this process it’s as good as it’s going to get for my purposes. This machine spits out batts onto a roller at the end.

This is the backside of the carder, you can see towards the bottom the thin mesh of wool, that’s how it comes out of the machine and laid onto the batt.

The big white ball at the bottom is the batt itself! It’s ready for felting and, though it looks huge, that’s only ONE pound of wool…and I have hundreds. It took Jennifer and I about 90 minutes to measure, pick and card 2 pounds so for this project patience is a virtue! I’m having a bunch of people to NH this weekend and we’re going to play around with which version is feltier. Once we know we’ll have the rest of the wool done with that ratio of Dorset to Icelandic and get going on the yurt!

These cuties were standing by watching me leave, bahhing up a storm! So cute I had to take a pic, they are so fluffy in their coats!

]]> http://yurtalert.com/2010/08/12/progress/feed/ 0 pokate Wool Picker Picker Room Picker hole Carder Carder2 Batt Sheep http://yurtalert.com/2010/07/16/the-yurt-alert-goes-on-vacation-guatemala-style/ http://yurtalert.com/2010/07/16/the-yurt-alert-goes-on-vacation-guatemala-style/#comments Fri, 16 Jul 2010 17:07:32 +0000 pokate http://yurtalert.com/?p=311 ]]> Pardon my absence from the blog — I’ve had a remarkably busy summer so far! Last week my mother and I traveled to Guatemala with my non-profit of choice, Build a Nest. We went to visit our micro-bartering groups in Guatemala City and the Lake Atitlan region. While Guatemala has low numbers of sheep and artisans work mostly in cotton I still managed to find me some sheepies to hang out with.

Aren’t they cute! They’re pretty big, right? They live int his little wooden hut that the group built for them up in the highlands! We met so many groups, some who were seamstresses and sewers in Guatemala City and some that are traditional backstrap weavers.

I had never seen backstrap weaving before and it is intense. I have no idea how they keep their tension right and sit light that on their knees for hours and hours. On our last day we went to the city of Antigua and visited another loan recipient of sorts, the Indigo Artes Textiles Center. We learned all about organic dying, weaving and more! And the funniest part was there was a group down there at the same time from Harrisville Designs where I buy all of my yurt rewards yarn!

Overall it was an amazing trip with lots of textiles-related activities! Now I’m back at work and trying to finish up my rewards for everyone — it’s taken much longer than I thought!

That’s mom — and that’s one HUGE sheared sheep! It was the most wool I’d ever seen all connected together at once, that guy must have been a little fatty. Some of the wool was very clean and some of it was gnarly and had tons of hay in it. I tried my hardest to get the hay out but sometimes it was just too bad. I’m new to skirting so I wasn’t sure how much to remove but I think I got all the really bad stuff.

Look at that big pile of cleanish wool! We used the table to skirt, letting detritus fall below and then tossed the clean ones onto a tarp in the driveway. Needless to say, I got a little sunburned. It went quickly but not super fast.

Look how happy I am! That’s over 150 pounds of Dorset wool that’s going to soon be blended with our Icelandic! More to come, this is just the beginning!

Look at that cutie! I haven’t decided on a name yet but I do love him to death already.

Look how cute that little guy is after he got his haircut! It’s interesting because some people I’ve met in the yurt process don’t know that sheepshearing in fact doesn’t hurt the sheep — they are just getting their hair shorn off and given the timing of the shearings it’s pretty in keeping with them needing to cool off in the summer time.

The gray ones are pre-shearing and the white ones are post-shearing and, look, they’re all okay!

As some of you will notice this is the same sheep shearer as was at Woolapalooza — he is awesome. He works so fast but is very delicate with the sheep and very calm, they don’t resist whatsoever, I think they kind of like it.

There were also Alpacas, baby goats, little lambs, etc. It was a very animal-centric day!

And look at all that beautiful roving! It was all I could do to not steal it…though with those colors I’m sure I would have been caught. We also saw a neat sheepherding demonstration but I think the puppies were tired by the time we got to them! Overall the whole day was great, it was gorgeous out here in Boston and it was great to spend a day with my mom and dad again! My dad even bought me, for my upcoming birthday, a “piggie bank” that is actually a “sheepie bank” — it’s so cute!