Thanks Cathie for the lovely visit to NZ. Your Waitikare City in Aukland region is lovely.(BTW I had never heard of it.) For some reason it is just a delight to get these little titdbits from the other side off the world. Nice to have mental picture of other cultures who spin and love fiber and what their world is like. So while these tidbits might be ot they just add some extra life to fibernetters. Especially the city/rural life, fiber animals and the charming tale about the possum eating the fruit from the inside and leaving the skins! Hard to imagine all those skins still hanging on the trees.
Where I live in middle of Canada on the Canadian prairies, we don't have many sheep. This is cattle country. I am in a rural area about an hr from the city near lake Winnipeg. I have dairy cattle as my neighbors. They are very curious and if I am cleaning angora rabbitry they do come to see what I'm doing. One day I had 25 in my yard! We do have couple of sheep farms in this area, though mostly meat sheep. A newcomer from the east moved here with 250 wool sheep last year and has also set up fiber processing. But we do have a fair number of alpaca farms and this is the 3rd fiber processor. I'm hoping to bring in some miniature sheep and colored angora goats from the US and also maybe include some Suri llamas from Saskachewan. We have a studio tour (next weekend actually) that brings out the people from the city a little earlier than tourist season. We don't have anything as exotic as possum but we do get fishflies -which for one day every couple of years are everywhere. Of course we also have the dreaded mosquito. Though can't spin either of these like you can possum! If you check out the Gimli harbor cam on Lake Winnipeg (it is raining today) but you will see the harbour wall that local artists have "decorated". (And I am #23 on the map of our studio tour website). Regards, Dianne http://www.gimli.ca http://www.watchthewave.ca [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
