Circle M Farm

We’ve welcomed a new member into our crazy mixed-up Circle M family this week – Honeybun, a delightfully large and fluffy buff-colored angora rabbit that is to be my companion in the summer kitchen dye studio. Lovely new friend and fellow spinner, Laurie, brought her down yesterday from Madison, where she was getting to be a bit bossy with the small children and cats in her home. I find her just darling – twice as big as I expected and three times as soft – and hope she’ll be happy with the cool concrete floor and quiet atmosphere of the studio. So far, she won’t come out of her cage. But I’m working hard to coax her out with pellets, carrots, and dog bones, so I can pluck her belly.

That’s right. Pluck her belly. Angora rabbits have a super-soft, fluffy undercoat that is highly prized for warm knitwear. But rather than shear them like sheep, or comb them like dogs, the spinner does best to pluck the hair out. At least that’s what the book says. Like all animals that join the grand experiment that is this farm, this one comes with a book! Our farm bookshelf reads like Old Macdonald’s Library, with a volume or two for each breed, and the one for Honeybun is called “Angora: A Handbook for Spinners,” by Erica Lynne. Many thanks to Laurie for bringing the book when she brought the bunny.

In a section titled Harvesting, Lynne says, “There are three basic ways of parting a rabbit from its hair.” Funny! Apparently, plucking involves pulling the hair out by the roots during natural shedding times, which not only is most natural for the animal and produces the longest and most uniform fibers for spinning, it also stimulates further lush and even hair growth. Laurie told me today that when she last plucked Honeybun, in the spring, the bunny was so naked you could see right through to her pink skin. But she didn’t quite get to her underside, which is rather difficult to reach through the powerful kicking legs. So I’ll be having my girls help me with that as soon as the bunny emerges enough for me to catch her up.

Maggie, who’s 14, and Emma, my twelve-year-old, were, oddly, against taking in the rabbit. As a family, we’ve had some bad experiences with rodent-type animals. We’ve kept ferrets for over a decade, but ferrets are actually mustelids, more closely related to skunks and badgers than to rabbits and rats. Several years ago, Maggie was dying to have a hamster, which she bought, only to have it bite her so hard as to draw blood. We promptly returned it, only to have the replacement do the same. A few months later, Emma bought Maggie a pretty little orange hamster for her birthday, which was named Princess Peach and turned out to be very gentle. But they found it dead, feet up in the cage, under a month later.

Then there were the baby bunnies we found here at the farm the first week we moved. We must have mowed over the mother, or chased it away, because our dog Sunny found the abandoned babies in a nest among some cut brush. We brought them in and fed them hourly, only to have them die one by one over a period of days, swelled up like furry softballs. We later found out mama bunnies only feed the babies once a day, and have to lick their tummies to make them poop.

And they’ve heard stories about my college roommate’s brief harboring of a rabbit in our dorm. I don’t remember where the litter was kept, but I do recall that I found poop in all my shoes. So – they tried to talk me out of the angora. But they’ve definitely warmed up since meeting her. I really didn’t think they’d be able to resist a fluffy pet named Honeybun. And, she’s the color of Princess Peach. An orange marmalade kind of shade.

Based on the Book, I think Honeybun is an English Fawn Angora, which is great for me, since they are the softest and have no pokey guard hairs. Lynne says the fibers will make a garment that has a “velvety aura rather than a dramatic furriness,” and warns that the fine diameter can make it difficult to spin and dangerously easy to felt. She cautions that all angora is messy to work with, and recommends spinning with a sheet of cloth on your lap, so you can fold it away if you have to get up suddenly. “Do not use an apron, unless you leave the strings untied for rapid exit,” she says, and concludes the section called Controlling the Fluff with: “Of course it goes without saying that you don’t spin angora in the kitchen.”