At Long Last!
My website is back up again. It was a long 3 weeks, in which I lost some of my SEO standings, but I'm sure it will come back up again soon. I also don't have to try to post from the laptop. The keyboard was weird and I made all kinds of typos, and the screensize was small enough that I couldn't tell! Anyway, give me some feedback. If you can reach http://www.germanangora.net/, let me hear from you!

Factoid: Almost all breeders shear their rabbits now instead of pluck.

• 1. It is easier
• 2. It is more kind to the animal
• 3. The length tends to become more even, fewer shorts just coming in again from the plucking
• 4. It makes more halo to the yarn!
• 5. Plucking reduces the density over time. The guard hair becomes stiffer, and the down diminishes, so the ratio of guard to down gets larger, but overall less fiber

Cheers, Donna

I just HAVE to sing Betty Chu's praises. Her English are second to none. I just trimmed Chu's Honeysuckle, my doe from her, down yesterday and she gave me the astonishing wool shearing number of 9.3 ounches! That is just astonishing for a pure English angora rabbit. While my Germans have given me a pound or more on that interval (3 mo), Honeysuckle's pile of fiber is every bit as big. I am going to find the same sized sack of pure German and spin both of them to the same girth as nearly as I can. I'm betting the English goes just as far as German that might weigh much more than it. It is because each strand of German is heavy. So 2 identical volumes of fiber, Eng & Ger, the German will weigh more. But is it *really* any more fiber? I don't think so, and I'm going to attempt to offer some evidence of it. Even if it doesn't, there is just no comparison between the 2 fibers. The English is so much softer and luxurious! Who would want anything else? (And did I mention that she eats just half what Germans do?)

Edit: 4/10/09 I've decided the better (and more controlled way) to test English against German would be to take exactly 1 ounce of each and spin them as nearly identically as possible, and see if the english doesn't give you more length. Hard to judge volumes due to compacting fiber, etc.