Elephant No. 9: Acrylic Medium

At last week's yarn-spinning session, I was kindly invited to return to the countryside this week to play with acrylic medium. I've never used this stuff before, although I've eyed it in the art store from time to time and wondered what it would be like to work with.

The group holding the workshop was the West Carleton Fibre Guild, so the focus for today was using acrylic medium with fibre elements. The idea was a fabric support for the acrylic medium, with bits of lace, paper, ribbon, yarn and so forth embedded in it.

I honestly didn't quite grasp the concept from the newsletter I received, even when I looked at the helpful online references to other artists' finished works. The suggestion that I "think collage" didn't really help me, for some reason. However, I'm game for anything that offers me a chance to play with new materials, so off I went.

The list of suggested things to bring was pretty extensive: paint, glitter, beads, buttons, lace, ribbon, ink, paper, metallic bits, sequins, fabric, feathers, natural materials such as grasses, and anything else with a texture. And that didn't include the basic equipment such as canvas, palette, brushes, palette knives, plastic tablecloth, towel and parchment paper.

At first, I found the idea of dragging all this out to a community centre pretty daunting. I even toyed with the idea of just going to the workshop to learn, then doing the actual activity at home. But I'd optimistically loaded up the car last night, so what the heck. I figured I could always leave everything in the car until I knew what I was in for. As long as they'd let me make an elephant and not some sort of abstract to "get a feel for the materials", I'd be happy.

Acrylic medium is like very thick, gooey acrylic paint. It comes in various textures, weights and consistencies and, although it is usually white, it is also available in a modest range of colours. The "gel" version dries clear; most others dry white or translucent. The density of most acrylic mediums allow you to embed things in the surface and create surface textures. It can also be painted, dyed or stained, either before you apply it, or after it's dry. For those of you who paint, gesso would allow you a similar effect. The benefit of acrylic medium over gesso, however, is that you can sew through it, and it remains flexible, even when dry.

Our instructor Frances was great, and most people dove right in, making everything from intricate abstract fabric designs, to a purple cow, to my favourite: a Victorian-looking still life with feathers, real beetles and butterflies, seed pods and grasses. Just goes to show you that the acrylic medium is heavy enough and gooey enough that you can stick anything to it.

The medium I used was a gel with the consistency of pudding, and of course I glopped the stuff on way too thick. When it's thick, it allows for interesting sculptural effects, and allows you more leeway in embedding things into the medium. If it's thick, you can also sand or carve it later, if you like. Unfortunately, the thicker it is, the longer it takes to dry. This is helpful if you want to take your time manipulating the material, but a complete nuisance if you want to paint it—or if you just want it to dry, already. I liked the dimensionality I got, but I kept smearing the thicker parts with the side of my hand.

I created the elephant shape first, then loosely spread around the rest of the medium. I shredded bits of washed dryer sheets, poked them into the medium with a plastic knife, then moved them around to give the background some texture. For no apparent reason, I decided to add the three glass domes and a bunch of fine blue glitter. Not liking that, I added blue and purple splotches of paint. Didn't like that, either.

At that point the session ended, which was probably a good thing, as I had begun to chase my tail in artistic terms.

A few hours later, I looked at it again, and made it at least less horrible to me. I smushed green paint all over the background—and I really did have to smush it in to all the crevices of the now-hardened dryer sheet.

The elephant, on which the acrylic medium was thickest, was still very wet and gooey. This was a good thing when I went to embed beads in the headdress—a bad thing when I tried to paint over it.

I won't be framing the final result, although I found the material interesting to work with, and would definitely try it again. But next time no glitter.

Elephant Fact of the Day
An elephant's ears are very important for temperature regulation. Elephant ears consist of a thin layer of skin, stretched over cartilage and an extensive network of blood vessels. When it is particularly hot, you will see elephants flapping their ears continuously. This creates a slight breeze, cooling the surface blood vessels. The blood in these surface blood vessels—now cooled by as much as 6˚C/10˚F—is then circulated throughout the elephant's body.

One of the most obvious physical distinctions between African and Asian elephants is the size of their ears. This is because African elephants live closer to the equator, where it is warmer, while Asian elephants tend to live farther north, in slightly cooler climates.


To Support Elephant Welfare
World Wildlife Fund
World Society for the Protection of Animals
Elephant sanctuaries (this Wikipedia list allows you to click through to information on a number of sanctuaries around the world)
Performing Animal Welfare Society 

Elephant No. 8: Repoussé and Chasing

For today's elephant, I decided to try repoussé with a bit of chasing. The process I used was technically different from true repoussé and chasing—mostly because I didn't have a sheet of metal thick enough to use hammers and embossing tools. Instead, I used a piece of 36-gauge aluminum, and a technique that involved a bit of repoussé and chasing, but which was ultimately more like metal embossing. The principle is similar, but the execution is easier and faster.

Repoussé and chasing are ancient techniques that involve denting metal with various implements to create a design. In repoussé, the artist works on the reverse, creating a design that will appear in low relief when flipped over. Chasing involves the exact opposite: working from the front, the image is indented, to create a design that is depressed. Most metalworking of this type employs both repoussé and chasing, to fine-tune designs and give them extra dimensionality.

When done properly—in other words, not the way I've done it—this is a relatively slow and painstaking process. The metal must be annealed (heated and tempered first), and worked patiently, so that it doesn't crack and break. The softer and more malleable the metal, the quicker you can work. Thicker sheets of metal, and harder types of metal or alloys, will take longer if you are to avoid stressing them too quickly. If you've ever bashed away at a nail and watched the head begin to split and fray at the edges, you've seen metal stress at work.

Proper repoussé and chasing also require exotic equipment such as pitch (a tar-like resin) to allow the design to sink into something with a bit of give, as well as special hammers, tools and punches. Luckily, the metal I used was soft enough that it could be indented with the kind of metal tools you'd use to sculpt clay. For my "pitch" surface, I used a piece of low-pile fleece over a piece of heavy cardboard.

The most widely used metals for this type of work are copper, tin and bronze. This is partly because a high copper content makes metals more malleable, and partly because these metals are relatively inexpensive. Gold and silver are also easy to work, but their cost makes them the kind of thing you only want to play with once you've mastered the technique.

Most people draw their designs on the back of the metal (where they'll mostly be working) with a permanent marker, bearing in mind that the final result will be reversed. I was tempted to avoid the trouble of drawing anything, just so that I could just get started. But then I saw that even artists who bang simple circles into a sheet of metal draw the circles on first.

Rather than draw something of my own today, I chose this head of an armoured war elephant, created around the time of the birth of Christ. An armoured elephant made sense to me for something worked in metal, and I liked the idea of being able to play with texture in the scales and so forth.

Fragment from a copy of a bronze sculpture, ca. 1 A.D.
Collection of the Staatliche Antikensammlung, Munich

To start, I traced the outlines of the photograph onto heavy artist-grade tracing paper. Then, rather than draw onto the aluminum, I laid the tracing on top of the aluminum, and used the end of a fine paintbrush to incise my design. This indents the pilot lines.

The next step involves flipping the aluminum over to the reverse, and using a rounded tool of some sort (I used the cap of a pen) to emboss all the outlined areas. When you flip it back over, all the areas you embossed are now raised like little pillows.

Now comes the creative part. For my elephant, I wanted a fair amount of texture, so I scratched lines into the back, flipped it over and incised the outlines again, added sweeping lines in the ears with the end of a paintbrush handle, used the tip of a pair of tweezers to make little dots through the main part of the armour, and added some more texture from the front. For tools, you can use just about anything that will dent soft metal, and the techniques are pretty much what you'd use to draw or paint. If this were proper repoussé and chasing, on thicker metal, obviously tweezers and a paintbrush would be useless.

After I finished playing with all the textures, I ran a flat, round tool (actually a bottle of white-out) all around the outside edge, to make the design pop just a little more.

This was actually fun. Or perhaps just more my speed than origami and invisible ink.

Elephant Fact of the Day
Although many ancient peoples used war elephants, the Romans trained them primarily as performers. Using elephants whose inherent good nature had not been ruined by war training, the Romans taught them to play cymbals, sit on giant couches in togas, and even walk tightropes. And, when Julius Caesar returned to Rome in 51 B.C., following his final victory in Gaul, there were elephants on either side of the procession, lighting the way with candelabra held in their trunks.

To Support Elephant Welfare
World Wildlife Fund
World Society for the Protection of Animals
Elephant sanctuaries (this Wikipedia list allows you to click through to information on a number of sanctuaries around the world)
Performing Animal Welfare Society 

Elephant No. 7: Paint-by-Number

I remember doing one or two paint-by-number kits when I was a kid. I think one was of a dog, and one might have been a landscape with a farmhouse and horse. I don't think I finished either of them, but I did like the little kits. They came with cardboard covered in a sort of canvas surface, and bright turquoise outlines with numbers to tell you which colour went where.

Best of all were the tiny pots of paint, all linked together. Back then, the pots contained oil paint, which you had to stir, and which usually dried out before you could finish your masterpiece. Given that they were oil paints and had a pretty strong smell, most kids would probably have been high by the time they'd painted a tree branch.

Painting by number has come a long way since then. There are thousands of designs, and there have been a number of exhibitions devoted to this slightly dubious form of art. Even the phrase "paint-by-number" has found its way into common parlance, describing everything from the actual kits to the concept of doing something by rote.

The original paint-by-number kits were developed and produced in 1950 by Max S. Klein and Dan Robbins. Klein was an engineer and owner of Detroit, Michigan's Palmer Paint Company, and Robbins was a commercial artist. One source I read jokes that Robbins is the most reproduced artist in the world, because he designed so many of the designs for the kits.

In 1951, Palmer Paint introduced the Craft Master brand of kits, with boxtop mottoes such as, "A beautiful oil painting the first time you try" and "Every man a Rembrandt." My mother brought me this kit that someone had in their basement. The motto on the back of this one is "The Art of Relaxation". Definitely not my experience today.

Palmer Paint sold over 12 million kits fairly quickly, prompting other companies to produce similar items. The Palmer Paint Company's archives are now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, which also produced a comprehensive exhibition on paint-by-number.

In 2008, a private collector in Massachusetts assembled over 6,000 works of paint-by-number, dating back to the 1950s. The resulting collection was used to create the Paint By Number Museum: the world's largest online archive of its kind.

The kit I bought for today's elephant is similar to the ones I had as a kid: cardboard covered in a canvas-like surface, outlines with numbers (bluish-black rather than turquoise), tiny pots of paint, and a brush. The only real difference is that the paints are now acrylic. I guess I don't get to relive the entire experience of stinky paint, watering eyes and dried-out brush—but we can't have everything.

I couldn't find a paint-by-number kit in the art store that had just an elephant, so I bought this one. I figured I'd paint just the elephant and ignore or overpaint all the other animals, since the whole idea of the blog is an elephant a day, not a herd of African animals a day.

I'd forgotten how much I don't like painting by numbers. It literally took hours, even though I only did the elephant. I also didn't like having to mix my own colours—the old kits came with every last colour you needed. Very few of the colours on my elephant are directly from the little pots of paint. Most of them were blends, which meant that, even within one area, the colour varied wildly.

There was also a problem with paint consistency. If I put the paint on thick, it was difficult to manoeuvre into the skinnier spaces. If it was too wet, it wasn't opaque enough, and spread into areas in which it didn't belong. And always, the lines and numbers showed through, unless the paint was basically trowelled on. 

I'm probably just not patient enough to do something like this. In the interests of making it look fairly realistic, the numbered areas are quite detailed, making it hard to fill in anything quickly. I kept thinking that I could have painted a similar-looking elephant from scratch in half the time. Then again, it probably wouldn't have looked as much like a real elephant.

Next time I try painting by number, I think I'll use magic markers.

Elephant Fact of the Day
There is a whole industry devoted to the paintings of elephants. Some have tried to claim that elephants can paint things such as flowers, and even other elephants. While elephants can indeed paint such things when carefully directed by their handlers, most elephant art is, to put it mildly, highly abstract.

To Support Elephant Welfare
World Wildlife Fund
World Society for the Protection of Animals
Elephant sanctuaries (this Wikipedia list allows you to click through to information on a number of sanctuaries around the world)
Performing Animal Welfare Society 

Elephant No. 6: Green Wall Mural

I've always wanted to try topiary, but my lone cedar tree is a bit too spindly this year to produce a good elephant. Instead, I turned my attention to the ivy growing on the side of our house. Normally I wouldn't think of removing leaves willy-nilly, but the seasons are changing, and the leaves are about to turn red and fall off anyway. It seemed as good a time as any to play with the idea of a green wall mural.

Green walls—also called "living walls" or "vegetated walls"—are a relatively new trend in eco-conscious architecture. The green walls being showcased these days are usually elaborate and highly decorative, and are even being produced for indoor environments. Mosses, trained vines such as passionflower and virginia creeper, groundcovers, ferns, grasses and more all find their way into what are essentially vertical landscapes.

Growing greenery on a wall is really nothing new. Stately homes abound in ivy-covered walls, and when I was a kid, there was boston ivy all over the walls of my parents' house. In fact, one of the first things I did, when faced with the ugly stucco of our urban house, was plant boston ivy myself. It's taken about a decade to get like this—and there are times when I wish it weren't quite so vigorous—but right now it looks to me like a very nice canvas.

Not having thought ahead enough to plant mosses and other things on the side of the house, my green wall elephant consists solely of trimming away what didn't look like an elephant to me. Using the hydro meter as the elephant's eye, and ignoring the window towards the back, I concentrated on revealing an elephant by removing leaves. I started with the topline of the head and went on from there.

The one thing I hadn't counted on is that the leaves are big. This means that, when you cut one away, you are left with a big hole. By the same token, any leaf left in place takes up a lot of space. I suppose I could have trimmed individual leaves into shapes, but that seemed a bit cruel somehow. Better to remove a leaf entirely than mutilate it. I didn't want, either, to completely remove all the leaves around the elephant, although in retrospect that might have made the elephant stand out more.

Given that most of the leaves were as big as my face, the effect I was able to achieve is rather abstract. Not only are the leaves big, but they also hang down, meaning that I had to contend with green stems cluttering up the negative space. If I cut off a stem, I would also cut off the leaf hanging from it, and the elephant would start disappearing. Something with tiny leaves and short stems would have been easier. Moss or some kind of close-growing groundcover would have been even better.

Once I could picture the general shape in the ivy, it was easy to cut away everything that wasn't the elephant. It took me about 50 minutes, including clambering up and down a ladder, removing the ladder, replacing the ladder and clambering up and down again, switching out a knife for scissors, fine-tuning the design, and sweeping up the detritus.

It's not exactly Michelangelo freeing David from a block of marble, but it'll do.


Elephant Fact of the Day
Elephants are herbivores, feeding primarily on the leaves, bark and fruit of trees and shrubs. They will generally reach up with their trunks to grab leaves and fruit, but if these are too far out of reach, an elephant will shake the tree until the leaves and fruit fall, or will even knock down the tree altogether.

Because of this, elephants can have a profound impact on ecosystems. By pulling down trees, breaking branches, and yanking out roots, they often reduce the forest cover. This creates clearings, and can even convert forest to savanna, and savanna to grasslands. This can benefit grazing animals that eat grasses, such as antelope, cattle and sheep. It is detrimental, however, to browsing animals, which eat the shoots, leaves, fruit and branches of trees: animals such as giraffes, monkeys—and, ironically, elephants.

To Support Elephant Welfare
World Wildlife Fund
World Society for the Protection of Animals
Elephant sanctuaries (this Wikipedia list allows you to click through to information on a number of sanctuaries around the world)
Performing Animal Welfare Society 

Elephant No. 4: Invisible Ink

For some reason, I've never tried invisible ink—not even as a child. I vaguely remember one of my brothers waving an invisible message in my face, then cackling and running away, but I never tried it myself.

Lemon juice is the simplest and most common form of invisible ink, revealed simply by holding the message over a 100-watt light bulb—and no, a compact fluorescent won't work. The heat of the bulb is what changes the composition of the lemon juice, essentially cooking the acids and sugars it contains.

There are four traditional types of invisible ink:
• Inks developed with heat, such as lemon juice, onion juice, milk, and vinegar
• Inks developed through chemical reaction, such as ammonia/red cabbage and corn starch/iodine
• Inks visible under UV light, such as sunscreen, laundry blueing, and tonic water
• Inks that disturb the surface of the paper—in other words, pretty much any liquid

Invisible ink can obviously be far more exotic than any of the examples above. Throughout history, however, the main criteria for invisible ink have been that the material used to write, and the means of developing the invisible ink, should be common enough that a field operative could both write and develop a message without special chemicals or equipment. That being said, I recently read an article about an invisible ink made with bacteria. Under certain a wavelength of light, fluorescent proteins—produced by seven specially engineered strains of E. coli—reveal colour-coded messages.

My first thought for today's elephant was that I should just use lemon juice. After yesterday's origami trauma, something simple would have been nice. However, once I started reading about invisible ink online, I decided on something more exotic: ammonia and red cabbage. When I mentioned this to my husband, he said he was very glad he was out of town today.



My reasoning was that I have an old bottle of ammonia in the house, and red cabbage is easy to come by. Also, a spy lurking about the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War would surely have been able to find both urine (which contains ammonia) and cabbage. Bonus: red cabbage can also be used to make a pH indicator. I could also have used vinegar instead of the ammonia; but, strangely, there was no white vinegar in the house. So, ammonia it is.

 

First of all, open the windows if you're using ammonia. Second of all, open the windows if you're boiling cabbage. According to the Wikipedia page I read, when any invisible ink dries, "the written surface should appear blank, with a similar texture and reflectivity as the surrounding surface." Okey dokey, then.

I found that trying to draw with ammonia using a toothpick or bamboo skewer is well-nigh impossible, as there is not enough liquid on the tip to see what you're drawing. So I tried a brush. A brush, however, holds too much liquid, making the lines fairly obvious, due to the rippling of the paper. I'm sure I should have used a pen nib, but I had no idea what ammonia would do to my precious art pens, so I used pointy skewers and a small paintbrush instead.

To reveal the invisible ink (in my case, not so invisible), you just brush the strained red cabbage liquid over the page, and voila!

Well, I suppose "voila" isn't exactly the right word. If you really squint, you can see the vague outline of an elephant. At first, when the paper was still damp, the image appeared only briefly, then began to disappear as the paper began to dry. I was deeply disappointed, thinking, "Clearly, when they say invisible, they mean invisible."

In my disappointment, I turned to lemon juice and a light bulb. Who in the world thought this was a good activity for kids? I ran the thing over 100-watt light bulbs, blasted it with a hair dryer, put it on top of the toaster, and eventually tried putting it inside the oven on low heat. The light bulb takes forever, and only develops the parts that are truly saturated with lemon juice. The hair dryer does nothing. Both the toaster and the oven mostly scorch the paper without making the design any more evident than it was before.

I began to think that I should ditch the whole idea of invisible ink and just start airing out the house. However, when gathering up the ammonia/cabbage drawings to toss in the recycling, I noticed that the design was actually developing and becoming clearer. Not that it's stunningly obvious, but at least there's something there now—as long as you look on the reverse, rather than the side on which you originally drew.

But now I'm wondering two things: were people supposed to read their messages backwards? And how long was an undercover operative supposed to keep a note written in ammonia ink, once he or she had laid on the cabbage juice? Hours? Days? It took at least four hours for my images to develop. If it was a matter of life and death, better write out your will. Just not in invisible ink.

Elephant Lore of the Day
I've always liked this well-known folktale, which originated in India. This is my own paraphrase, but there is a poem version of the story written in the nineteenth century by John Godfrey Saxe, and there are innumerable prose versions available, both in books and online. 

Six blind scholars were asked to describe what an elephant—an animal they had never seen—might look like.

The first, touching the elephant's side, suggested that an elephant must be very like a wall.
The second, touching a tusk, was sure that the elephant must look like a spear.
The third, grabbing the trunk, was sure that elephants must resemble snakes.
The fourth felt the elephant's leg, and thought that an elephant must be tall and strong like a tree.
The fifth, who touched only an ear, declared that an elephant must look like a fan.
And the sixth, seizing the elephant's tail, thought the creature must resemble rope.

So wildly did their opinions disagree, that they began fighting among themselves, eventually killing one another. 



To Support Elephant Welfare
World Wildlife Fund
World Society for the Protection of Animals
Elephant sanctuaries (this Wikipedia list allows you to click through to information on a number of sanctuaries around the world)
Performing Animal Welfare Society

Elephant No. 3: Origami

I've never really liked making origami.

The only thing I've ever been able to fold is a bird. And not even a good bird. I tried paper cranes once, but they ended up looking more like one of those hats you see on kids in Victorian illustrations. How Sadako of One Thousand Paper Cranes fame made so many of the things, I'll never know. My father used to make origami balls that he inflated by blowing into them, and paper cups you could actually drink from. Sadly, the paper engineering gene skipped me, although my younger sister is a master at this kind of thing.

Developed in Japan in the seventeenth century A.D., origami involves using squares of paper to produce three-dimensional forms with a range of simple folds. The word "origami" literally means paper (ori) folding (kami). Traditional origami paper is coloured on one side, and plain on the other, but any paper can be used for origami, as long as it holds a decent fold. Heavier papers can make it difficult to form creases in complicated forms, but are apparently better for wet-folded origami.

Today I decided that the passage of time may have eased the trauma of folding unrecognizable animals with coloured paper. I found a couple of sets of instructions online, and settled on a very attractive elephant by Vancouver-based artist Joseph Wu, a star of the origami world. It even came with its own video, rather than a mystifying set of printed instructions. My reasoning was that this would allow me to fold along in real time, which would surely make it easier. 

The video was probably one of the best instructional videos I've ever seen. The instructions were clear and precise, and all the steps were carefully demonstrated and explained. With such a great virtual instructor, I was convinced it would be a piece of cake to make the elephant in question. 

Here are my two attempts. I was fine until we got to ears and head. Then I got completely lost, folding and unfolding hopelessly while staring at the screen, rewinding the video, and trying again. The second attempt was a little better than the first, but there are times when you just have to admit defeat. After three hours trying to follow a 30-minute video, I felt I had no choice but to give up and try a different elephant.

The second set of instructions—also clear and easy to follow—was based on my nemesis, the paper crane. The elephant I made is clunky and barely looks like an elephant, but I'll take it. And at least I never have to make one again.

                               



Origami is definitely not for me. It may be that it's too precise for my I-hate-rules-and-never-read-instructions brain. Or it may just be that I don't like folding things into shapes. I never mastered paper airplanes, either. And if you ever come to my house for dinner, the napkins will never be folded into bird shapes or cute little pockets. That's what napkin rings are for.

Elephant Lore of the Day
Elephant dung can be used to make paper. I actually wish I'd thought of using elephant dung paper to make an origami elephant. But then I would have had to cut a perfect square, and that's something I'm even worse at than folding origami.

To Support Elephant Welfare
World Wildlife Fund
World Society for the Protection of Animals
Elephant sanctuaries (this Wikipedia list allows you to click through to information on a number of sanctuaries around the world)
Performing Animal Welfare Society

Elephant No. 2: Spinning Yarn

                            


This morning I drove out into the countryside to learn how to spin yarn. This is something I have never remotely attempted before. After being generously invited to try it a few weeks ago while chatting with a pro spinner, I figured it was worth a try. Beth made it look easy, so I had visions of coming away from this morning's session with a perhaps-not-perfect, but at least acceptable ball of yarn.

"Perhaps-not-perfect" is being kind. The people trying to show me how to use the ratchafratcha spinning wheel were also being kind when they said (for the two seconds that I had the hang of it) that I was a "natural".

My yarn, as you can see, is ridiculously curly and twists many times around itself. Kay, one of my very pleasant and patient instructors, said I should keep my little skein of pink yarn as a memento, because I'll never be able to achieve this effect again. One can only hope.

My ineptitude has nothing to do with the people teaching me. I think it was mostly that I made the spinning wheel go too fast, held onto my yarn too long, and basically lacked any kind of hand-foot-eye coordination. This is why I don't play sports. That being said, I was kind of hooked, and will definitely try to master spinning on a wheel. I guess I have to, because I need to spin a skein of single-ply yarn to bring to the session next month.

I also tried the drop spindle, which is a technique that has been used in all cultures for millennia. Women and girls often spin even while walking or riding animals. This is something at which I am a little more adept (the spindle part, not the walking and riding animals part), probably because there are no moving parts to contend with. This does not mean that I am actually good at it — I just suck a little less. From what I can gather, most people who use spinning wheels don't really like drop spindles, and vice-versa.



Although Kay, our host, no longer has sheep, there were sheep at the farm next door. Sheep farmers around here sell the raw fleece to a number of small local mills, where the fleece is washed, carded and sold either as carded batts or roving, or spun into yarn.

I wanted to photograph the sheep, but the resident guard llama did not take kindly to me. As soon as he saw my car stop on the opposite side of the road, he ran over and made himself as big and threatening as he could. Since I didn't go away immediately, the nearby guard donkey decided to take over, chasing off the guard llama and staring me down until I got back in my car and went away. I don't think I look or smell like a coyote (the main sheep menace in these parts), but maybe the llama and donkey just don't like anything new.

 

http://www.sheep101.info/famoussheep.html

Speaking of sheep, I recently read about a Merino sheep in New Zealand called Shrek, who managed to evade capture at shearing time for six years. When he was finally caught and sheared in 2004, his fleece weighed about sixty pounds (27 kilograms) — enough wool to make twenty men's suits. A normal Merino fleece weighs about ten pounds (4.5 kilograms).




And now for today's elephant. As I mentioned above, I was expecting to come away with yarn that was at least more or less a straight line, and thought I might "draw" an elephant with it. But since I'm stuck with this curly stuff, it's a little more blobby and a little less elegant than I envisioned. Essentially all I've done is arrange the yarn I spun on white card stock. I didn't want to cut, crochet, knit or knot it, so it's just laid flat — well, as flat as it would lie, anyway. Nothing is pinned or glued, and it had an irritating tendency to sproing and uncoil while I was trying to photograph it.

If I ever manage to make yarn that actually looks like yarn, you'll be the first to know.


Elephant Lore of the Day
Although elephants are technically considered hairless, they actually have hair over their entire bodies. Baby elephants are covered in a pelt of fine, downy hair, which is largely shed before birth. Adult elephant hair is coarse and wiry, making it useless for spinning, although it is sometimes used to make bracelets.


To Support Elephant Welfare
World Wildlife Fund
World Society for the Protection of Animals
Elephant sanctuaries (this Wikipedia list allows you to click through to information on a number of sanctuaries around the world)
Performing Animal Welfare Society