Angora "Wool" Bunnies

February 3rd, 2011

These fuzzy bunnies sure do make some nice "wool". Apparently, amongst rabbit folks, Angora rabbits make "wool" and not "fur". Fur is produced by skinning the rabbit and then you have fur and dinner and no more rabbit.

Angora bunnies shed their "wool" about three times a year and it is either plucked or sheared off of them. When they shed, the wool comes off easily so mostly the "plucking" is to separate the old falling off hair from the new growing in hair and not pull growing hair off the bunny. So it doesn't hurt the bunny to have their hair plucked or pulled off even though it sure sounds like it would be painful. Clipping the wool is faster than plucking, at least for me at my current skill level. The bunnies look kinda skinny afterwards, too. Here's Zephyr after a hair cut.

The spinning folks prefer the wool to be plucked since there aren't any cut edges or those really short pieces from double cutting when you miss the first time. Plucked wool is also a bit longer, but when getting the wool off the rabbit whatever method works best is my theory. There are some folks in Australia who spread the rabbit out on a revolving table and put them in little handcuffs to shear them. That is a lot more efficient, I'm sure, although it looks like some sort of medieval torture device at first glance. I suppose if the rabbits were accustomed to it, they wouldn't even mind, but the rabbits here just get brushed and clipped with scissors.

Usually when grooming the rabbits there will be hair in the brush and that is saved, too. I have separate containers for the wool, one for each color of wool. There isn't a lot of color difference, though, it is all either white or a shade of gray or grayish tan. I haven't tried dying the wool yet, that will be for when I get tired of white and shades of gray. They say Kool-Aid works as a good dye, I'm not sure about that, but who knows maybe it will work. I'll look into details once dying becomes something I'm planning on doing.

Once there is enough wool, it is lightly carded to get the fibers ready for spinning. We found some antique cotton cards at a garage sale so I use those, although I also have a dog grooming wire toothed "slicker" brush which makes a pretty good wool card. The antique ones are much bigger though so they are faster.

At the moment, I'm trying for consistency when spinning. I'm sure there's some trick I don't know yet, but it's not like there are a lot of folks around to answer spinning questions. I'm trying for smoothness and consistency, we will see how that goes. At the moment, there are three scarves half done since there isn't matching yarn to finish them off. Either I ran out of that color of fiber or the yarn was spun up in a different thickness. I like the big thick yarn since it knits up faster, but that goes through rabbit fiber at a great pace, so I run out of fiber to work with pretty quick.

I've only had the spinning wheel since December, so there's still loads to learn but I've found spinning to be quite relaxing and fun.