Alpacas: Fun, Fuzzy Fibre - and Fill the Freezer??

Okay, so they aren't Storm Troopers but they do give off the impression of evil clones, don't they? In truth, they are more likely to take over the universe with their bone-crushing cuteness.

I was inspired into knitting another Doctor Who scarf after being exposed to dozens of 70's video clips and photos on the Doctor Who Facebook Page during Tom Baker week - showing the fourth Doctor in all his glory with that ridiculously long scarf of his. My old scarf was getting kind of ratty, so I started a new one - this time following the original pattern on DoctorWhoScarf.com to make an exact duplicate of the original. When my mom saw me knitting it she promptly informed me that I promised her a scarf last winter and never got around to it... so now it looks like I will be knitting well into the winter!

This is how my brain works: Facebook > Doctor Who > Scarf > Knitting > Spinning Yarn > Raising Alpacas. I have the unrelenting desire to get right to the source of things. Knitting isn't enough, no, no, no - I want to make the yarn myself. I want to raise the animals to harvest the fiber to make the yarn to knit the scarf that will profess my geek-dom to the world. I love alpaca yarn - it is so very soft and nice to work with, for starters, and from a spinner's/knitter's point of view it is a high-quality, valuable fiber that is just a little off-the-beaten-path from regular sheep's wool.

So when I graduate from university, find a job and buy a little place where I can have some livestock, alpacas are something I would be very interested in. First of all, according to the almighty, all-knowing Google, one can raise 8-10 alpacas on one acre of good pasture. Due to their soft, non-hoofed feet and the way they pinch grass off with their teeth instead of pulling it out by the roots, they are very gentle on the land. Each animal can produce 5-10 pounds of fiber every year, which sells from 2-5 dollars per ounce as raw fiber and more for spun yarn. It contains no lanolin - which is a grease-like substance in sheep's wool that has to be washed out several times before the wool is spinable - so the fibre can be spun as it is right off the alpaca. The alpacas themselves are "blown-out" with a leaf-blower before shearing to remove any dirt and foreign material.

I do have questions regarding the meat of alpacas. "To eat or not to eat" alpacas seems to be a hotly debated subject among alpaca keepers. From what I understand, each alpaca can be shorn once per year - the first time they are shorn produces the finest quality fiber, and the second and third cuts are of lesser quality respectively as the fibre becomes coarser as the animals age. At what age is the fiber no longer suitable for spinning? Alpacas apparently can live over 20 years, so with the exception of quality breeding animals, how old are they before theirr fiber is no longer desirable? With one-year-old alpacas producing the best fibre, it makes sense to me that one would want to breed their alpacas every year. Eating the older stock seems justifiable to me. It certainly beats selling unwanted animals for cheap (or giving them away) to places where they might be neglected or abused, and dumping unwanted stock for little or no money drives down the price of the animals themselves by saturating the market - making it un-economical for those breeders out there who are devoting their time to producing high-quality animals to continue doing so. To live sustainably and economically on a small farm, herd culling has to take place whether one is raising chickens, cows, pigs, sheep, or alpacas. I can put a significant amount of free-range, grass-fed, organic meat in my freezer and avoid supporting factory farming by not having to buy meat at the supermarket. Keeping an animal for both fibre and meat is also more economical than keeping one type of animal exclusively for meat and another type of animal exclusively for fibre.

Time will tell what I decide to do once the time comes. My goal is to live economically, support humane agriculture, and get as much utility from the land as possible. I think one way or the other, a couple alpacas would be a suitable addition to this grand scheme.

Northwords Writer's Camp - and thus FOTB is born

I intended to spend my summer volunteering at the Lesser Slave Lake Bird Observatory banding birds and helping to collect migration data - but I was only there for 8 days when a massive forest fire swept through town and left half of it in ashes. All activities in the park were halted until further notice, and I spent a couple weeks drifting from town to town, bunking with friends, relatives, and strangers just waiting for word - and when I finally couldn't take it anymore I decided to call it and go home.

There's not much for meaningful work in the animal health field in the Terrace area, so I decided to spend my summer getting my driver's licence (I'm 25 and I still don't drive!) and working on a research project for a course I am due to take in the fall. This summer has been rainy, cold, miserable, and otherwise dreadfully dull - other than the part where I was running for my life from raging forest fires, which was pretty exciting - so when I heard that Northwords was putting on a 5 day writer's camp, I jumped on it just as an excuse to get out of the house and talk to some humans who were not my parents for a change. Lately, going to Walmart to buy junk food has been the biggest social event I've been looking forward to every week, so I was due for a bit of mental stimulation.

I am so glad I went! I have been contemplating starting a blog for some time, I just didn't think my life was interesting enough or that I had the discipline to keep up with it - but because I am a writer, I have the power to MAKE things interesting, and since there has been a lot of discussion in the past few days about blogging and how to make it work, I feel like I'm up to the challenge. I was born to create things, you see. I am first and foremost a writer - I live to tell stories and love marking up a clean page and then stacking up all those pages into a solid book. I am really not happy unless I am taking stuff from my brain and turning it into real things - I also love to knit, draw, paint, build stuff out of lumber, bind books, and once in a while I've been known to taxidermy particularly cool dead birds I've come across (I was getting quite good at avian taxidermy by the time I was 14 but stopped doing it because it's a rather expensive hobby for a kid whose income comes from bottles).

Just hearing other writers speak about their experience and listening to them share their work is very inspiring to me. It lights a fire under my butt and makes me want to work again. I have two works in progress going at the moment: one novel I call The Road to Venetia which I wrote in first year university is very near completion - I am working on editing the 2nd draft and if I can ever get it done, I plan to self-publish it through Lulu.com as I did with my farming memoir The Urban Farmer in 2009. My other work in progress is a science-fiction novel which I don't have a name for, but it's still in the small stages at the moment. I write only for myself these days - I quit trying to write stuff that I intended to sell to magazines because I found that as soon as I just let my heart go free and write what I want, my work turns out so much better. "Write with the door open" says Stephen King, and I didn't realize just what he meant until I experienced it for myself. Thanks to Northwords and the brilliant people there who got me back on track again!

Letting the fox out of the box: an introduction

I fear conventional living. Getting up, plugging through work every day like a zombie, coming home, eating some random food, watching TV till bed and just repeating the process over and over. I have lived this life. I don't want it.

I have one more year of university before I graduate from the Animal Health Technology field (which, in simpler terms, is like being a veterinary nurse except we do so much more than a human nurse would!). I don't think my dreams are very grand, but they are grand to me: I want to buy a little house on a few acres where I can raise chickens, maybe a cow or some sheep, grow a garden and do some home-canning every year. I'd like a little studio with a bunch of desks where I can write stories, paint pictures, and otherwise feed my inner mad scientist and just let him go nuts.

I have been living on my parent's 16 acre farm since 2004 (with a couple years here and there out of town for university) and I just can't go back to suburban living. I love it. I have outrageous ideas that I am itching to turn into reality. Lawns, for example. Lawns are a waste of time and space. Why grow grass when you can grow potatoes? If I have to have a lawn, that's where the alpacas will live. Same with living rooms. Although I don't think the alpacas will live in the living room, the living room is the biggest room in the house - so why is it almost always empty? It would make a fantastic studio - fill it up with shelves and desks and things. My mom shudders at the thought, but I drool.

Boredom is my worst enemy, because if boredom is not nipped in the bud it turns into depression. I am not happy unless I am creating something: writing a novel, knitting an obnoxiously long Doctor Who scarf, building a chicken coop - as long as I am taking things out of my brain and turning them into real things, I'm good. The thing is, most of the time this costs a bit of money. Hence, education.

I have been a fox in a box for far too long. The next year is going to be full of very long days, dorm-living, and nerve-racking exams - but with plenty of time to dream in between. See you there!