A friend of mine has a friend with a Bison herd (American Buffalo).  She asked me if I could make something nice for her friend from the down that her bison shed every spring, and I agreed to do so.  She collected the down and sent me about 7 ozs or so, which included the weight of the mud and dirt, and I sent it off to a fiber mill to be dehaired and processed into roving or fluff so I could spin it and knit a scarf for her.  I have used this fiber mill before and they do a lovely job of processing, and anyone familiar with the fiber mills know there is always a wait because they are very busy.   Unfortunately a misunderstanding occurred in understanding the processing I had requested and they blended and spun it into yarn.  Because bison is such a short fiber the mill blends with with another fine fiber (merino) for spinning it into yarn.  The yarn is beautiful, so their work is still impeccable, but my friend’s friend wanted pure bison fiber for the scarf.  The box I got back had a beautiful skein of sport weight blended bison yarn (I would have spun it a little lighter into a heavy sock weight), some left over roving (which is very soft and wonderful) and the hair that came from the dehairing.  Tho I know there is weight lost during the washing process, I didn’t realize how much was lost in the dehairing process as I’ve never had a fiber that required it before so that was a learning process for me, but it was still enough for a nice scarf a little less long than I had intended.  I got the finished scarf, used my Little Lace Cast’s Paw scarf pattern, off in the mail on Tuesday and she should get the scarf and left over fibers today. 🙂  I hope she will be pleased with the results even if it wasn’t quite what she had wanted.  There is always next year.  Oh the fiber mill was very apologetic, they had just hired a new employee who was still learning what to do with the orders.  All is forgiven, their work is very nice.

Hmmm, the depths of deep space seems to have eaten my last post which was about football season and my beloved Cowboys, maybe WordPress doesn’t like the Cowboys, hmmm, gonna sneak it back in here anyway.  😛  GO COWBOYS!!!