Farm Fresh Blog

My world changed when I stuck my fingers in the bag.

Addiction is a funny thing. Some addictions I can understand - horses, chocolate, coffee, and cupcakes. Some confuse me - gambling (too expensive), alcohol (I fall asleep), drugs (I'm not doing prison time for anything short of a chocolate horse drinking coffee while eating a cupcake.) But given the above lists, I still try not to judge someone else's addictions because I'm as helpless in front of a cupcake as any crackfiend behind a convenience store. I know I have certain weaknesses, so it doesn't surprise me if I cave when faced by cupcakes or another dog, but sometimes I'm genuinely tripped up when I realize I've been captured like a moth in a spider web by a new addiction.  I struggle in the snare, wondering how it happened.

Sometimes it's slow, like coffee, so gradual that you don't even realize it's happening, but other times it's like the sweet spread of a smile across a child's face when she gets her first taste of chocolate. That's what happened this week when I stuck my fingers in the bag.

So let's examine the anatomy of addiction:

Start with weedeater goats, move to producing meat goats. Move to raising dairy goats and making goat milk soap. Goats are so versatile that you decide the world would be a better place if every home had a couple of goats and a handful of chickens. Somewhere along with the idea of a Victory Garden, the government dropped the ball by not encouraging everyone to get goats and chickens.

Goats lead to sheep. Start with meat sheep, but decide that the sheep equivalent of the American Bison is the Navajo Churro sheep because it gives meat, milk, and fiber, so in addition to your dairy goats, you want to add Navajo Churro Sheep. Fall into a flock of Navajo Churros by accident. Fall in love. At first you are just happy having them but then you decide to play with the idea of spinning their wool into yarn and weaving saddle pads and cinches. You have no interest whatsoever in knitting, or crochet.

Your interest really is in the animal and getting the fiber into yarn. You like the natural colors of the sheep. Then you discover natural plant dyes. So you decide you'd like to dye some of your own wool. The slide to addiction begins.

You start to look longingly at spinning wheels. Since you don't know anyone who spins, you can't scratch that itch, but then the Fiber Fairy sends you a teacher, who brings her wheel over and gives you a lesson. She also gives you a lesson in knitting. You have no interest in knitting until the lesson. At the end of the lesson you are a child making Jacob's Ladder with a piece of twine, you cannot put it down. Not only can you not forget the knitting, you cannot forget the joy of spinning.
 

You now decide you must have a spinning wheel. You then drive two hours to the Yarn Store to play with spinning wheels and order one of Your Very Own. You walk into the shop and are immediately hit by more colors and textures than an outdoor flower market. You become drunk on the colors. The shopkeeper is keen and takes advantage of your dizzy state.

"Here, put your hand in here," she says as she offers a clear plastic bag filled with gray fluff.

You have no real expectations since you have house dogs and it looks like the stuff you sweep out from under the couch, but to be polite, you stick your fingers in the bag.

And that's when the addiction takes hold.

The fuzzy bundle is pygora, a breed of goat that is a cross between an Angora and a Pygmy. It is the softest, most magical fiber. You want to stuff the whole bag under your shirt and run with it. You are Gollum with The Ring. This fiber is The Missing Link, it completes the circuit for your addiction. No, you don't want to breed Pygora goats. You just want to touch fiber. You want to spin the fiber. You want to, God help you, knit the fiber.

At this point I'm sure my mother who raised a child with little or no Home Economics interests or skills is falling out of her chair with laughter, but she hides it well and does what she always does, she encourages my interest. My new spinning wheel will arrive next week, and I'm trying to resist the urge to buy a Pygora wether to add to my herd of goats. I trying to resist the thoughts that urge me to blend Angora fiber with Navajo churro fiber on my spinning wheel just to see. . .
 

And so that is the Anatomy of Addiction, the route of meat goat rancher to fiber farmer. Can I make money at it? Or course not. If it had been about money I would never have stuck my fingers in the bag.