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In honor of the Ides of March, my favorite Tiktok

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One thing they don’t tell you about sewing is that it is actually ironing

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Yesterday’s „It‘s morning and I don‘t wanna go to work“ Spin: Plying half the Merino/Sari Silk/Rose Fiber braid I spun up a couple days ago on my outdoor spin. Plied from a plying bracelet (my beloved). Let‘s see how much it puffs up after washing!

Fiber is „Blaue Rose“ by Mulberry Cottage Yarns.

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Sheep sheltering at a bus stop on a rainy day in Ireland.

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i have an odd animal husbandry question you seem like you might know the answer to, your comment about stan reminded me - ive been thinking about getting into backyard chickens for a couple years and the thing that makes me hesitate most is hard culling. im confident in my ability to put down an animal thats sick, or infirm, or for food, but for like, temperament? or for poor egg layers? just sticks on me for some reason. i think it would feel like telling them theyre not a good enough chicken for me. how to you process this part of animal husbandry?

This will be a little long, so bear with me.

If you want to keep use animals (animals bred for a purpose, to be used for a purpose instead of kept as a companion), you gotta get good with the idea that they are here for you under the agreement that you will only keep them as long as you need to. When you take them on, you are agreeing that you will release them to whatever their next life holds for them as soon as you do not need (or they've completed) their service. Maybe for some people that's just release to the biological cycle of life, for others maybe there's an eternal rest, for others maybe it's reincarnation. For soft culling that's just moving to the next household. Whatever it is, you are allowing them to pass to it in as humane a way as you can, and ultimately it is the single greatest kindness and gratitude you can show to them, to give them proper care while they are here and allow them to end with little to no pain- something animals outside of our care rarely get. You are thanking them for their service, and letting them go. Worth does not even begin to factor into it.

It is not easy to take a life. It is NEVER easy, regardless of reason, regardless of excuse, regardless of anything. It is ALWAYS heavy, and it will always hurt you. And it should. I am grateful for the weight of taking a life, because it reminds me that it is serious, and reminds me to take the production of life seriously, because at some point any life I cause to come into existence via breeding animals will have to end.

On top of that, some things ARE heath related that do not seem health related. Aggression in domestic animals IS A HEALTH ISSUE. A cock is aggressive because he is stressed about intruders, containment, mating threats, resource guarding, etc. Even with the best of care this can be true, and unfortunately for you both, this means the animal is not suited for domestic keeping. The same goes for animals (in any stripe of use, but particularly private care) that display repetitive stress behaviors from normal, proper captive care (for example, mice that are food chewing are stressed and should be culled from lines where possible because they are not having a good time). You are doing them a disservice to keep them in a stressful situation you cannot change because of their biology. It has nothing to do with not being good enough for you, and everything to do with producing/keeping animals that do not experience that stress in captive care and releasing the rest from duty because they will not be okay in any captive care.

For some issues (poor egg laying, for example) you CAN pet-home culls instead of hard culling. It's harder to do, you will spend time finding people who just want pets that don't intend to breed or don't care, but it can be done. However!! Is the bird just slow at producing eggs because her genetics say that's how fast eggs get produced, or is she producing slowly because there's a health problem that isn't immediately evident? Is her ovary damaged, is her reproductive tract infected, does she have a disorder that prevents her from processing food correctly so she can't get what she needs to produce eggs as fast as normal? Are you setting the bird up for failure (and someone else for heartbreak/money troubles) sending them to a pet home? Is it something which could lead to pain/suffering down the road if she's allowed to continue? Hard to say without spending a lot of money. Are you willing to risk your reputation, if someone takes a surprise illness/genetic issue down the road badly ("Oh THAT breeder sold me a sick/unhealthy bird/bird with bad genetics"), and compromise your ability to find homes for healthy birds down the road?

You are okay with culling a bird for food- there's nothing that says you cannot eat the bad temperaments, the poor egg layers, the one with genetic issues, and so on. And if you can tell early enough that you, personally, can't make use of the meat, there are plenty of folks with other animals that would LOVE feed for those animals. Take yourself down to a local reptile expo, grab the business cards for a few people who have big snake babies (retics, burmese, anaconda, redtail boa, even BP) that say they'd be interested in taking culls, OR look up local bird of prey rescues in your area (or reptile rescues or big cat rescues if there are any) and ask if they'd be interested in culls. There is ALWAYS someone that can use what you can't/won't. You may have to jump through some hoops to donate to some kinds of rescues (health testing for example), but it's an option you can look into if you want to combat the feelings you're talking about.

As a last note- and I am saying this gently and holding your face in both hands: do not anthropomorphize animals in reality.

In YOUR eyes, you are culling them an illness or an injury or for food or for temperament or for poor quality or or or---- it does not matter to the animal why you are culling them. A death is a death, to them. They are here, and then a thing happens, and they are no longer. They do not understand life or death or afterlife or reincarnation or that they are here for a purpose or not a purpose or literally anything you as a human might impose upon them in your head. They live while they are alive, and then they are not. They do not "want to live" in the "avoid death" sense because they do not necessarily understand "death" as a future concept. Instincts that have worked well to preserve life have been encoded in their DNA to one degree or another, they can and do respond to avoid pain, but with little exception (like... maybe elephants and dolphins and a crows and a few others), it's unlikely that they understand the connection between doing those things and being alive/avoiding death.

So while TO YOU it may feel like telling the bird they are not good enough, and TO ME it feels like allowing the bird to move on in peace... the bird doesn't know either way, and honestly the reason hardly matters. It is alive in the present, and one way or another it will not be alive someday, and you are responsible for making sure that the one way under your control is so peaceful or quick that the bird hardly knows it is no longer alive. The bird doesn't care about (and cannot understand) the why of their death, any more than they understand their pain/stress and how it relates medical assistance; it's why animals often freak out, refuse meds, etc. They don't hate the vet or the car or the carrier or anything- they just simply don't understand human stuff and react according to instincts/what they do understand. If you treat an animal like the animal it IS rather than the person you imagine it to be, you will find yourself with a lot better relationship with them during life, and be able to frame their passing a bit better later on.

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BFL locks, back lit, for funsies.

Fleece came up very clean and white. Yielding about 30% waste by weight, though it might not be waste, it might work for carding.

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Self-portrait 2024.

I paint a self-portrait yearly. I think it's a pleasing progression and record as I age.

It makes me excited to think about eventually painting myself old, grey-haired, wrinkled - probably still morbid and eccentric, still painting, hopefully painting things I can't even currently imagine.

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I mean Jesus fucking Christ this is not right

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Another new art piece I finished yesterday!! Super proud of this one!

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…aaand chainplied! 50g of „Bittersweet“ colourway by Regenbogenwolle, spun long draw when possible- the braid was quite matted and idk if it is this particular mixture, it happened during the dyeing process, or is due to sitting in my stash for 2 years. Am curious to see how much it puffs up during washing.

Stay tuned!

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Gav’s Tavern Hi, I hope you like this. It is different from what I usually do. Also it was a lot of work.

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EVERYONE STOP AND LOOK AT THIS

Have you ever heard of Shaun Keenan? Probably not, but you have now.

Amazing art of dinosaurs in the wild American West? Yes please!

There’s so many he’s done and they’re all just the best aesthetic.

What I never knew I needed but a void has definitely been filled.

Go to his website and give some support!

http://shaunkeenan.com/

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She's dry!!

I was not expecting to lose 10% of the weight again in lanolin, I've got 509gm now of spun wool.

I wish I'd weighed it myself at the very start, but I've lost about 50% all up of weight to impurities.

This wool is so nice, y'all. It's soft, fluffy, stretchy. Got the most wonderful neutral smell

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Ok I've recovered from holidays with my parents (it's complicated) and I'm feeling halfway to normal again, so I'll go get groceries and meanwhile

YOU

can brainstorm some ideas of things I can turn into

Linocut prints

Because I've got work tomorrow and I'm not going to spend today doing sensible things, like laundry, or tidying, I'm going to spend it making

Mediocre art

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The third and final leaf vest in my video, and my favourite of the 3, is this dark brown late autumn leaf. It's quilted, but much less densely than the previous one, and I pieced it together out of 2 slightly different shades of brown cotton.

The veins are embroidered in whipped chain stitch (for the denser areas I whipped all the rows together 2 at a time) and there are some patches of blanket stitch honeycomb to imitate venules. I wanted the leaf to look a little bit rotten. The beads along part of the bottom edge are inspired by a beautiful photo of slime mould growing along the edge of a leaf posted by Bea Leiderman on instagram.

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Wool from the Swedish Hälsingefår (sheep from Hälsingland) I've had in a box for ages and ages since I got a handful randomly visiting a barn store that sold cheese made from their milk.

It isn't cut for spinning, and very far out of my knowledge how to handle. But. Well. The cats want to eat it. I tried the longer rougher part of the fleece on my spinning hook (any knowledge if it is named otherwise in english is very welcome, somehow translations of craft terms so old you can barely find them in your own languages are quite hard to find). It went... so so x'D