This week has been tough: this week is Baby Loss Awareness week..
You may or may not know, but one in FOUR women are experiencing miscarriages. Most of the losses are dealt with alone. Often not speaking up that they have miscarried. It is often swept under the carpet even by doctors, saying we at least know we can get pregnant and go home and try again.
Most of the suffering and having to deal with the trauma of loss and hope , is dealt with alone. This is unexeptable! I know how hard it is because I have suffered 9 miscarriages, was then diagnosed with cancer of the uterus so all hopes of ever having a baby disappeared like snow on a warm day…..
I know how hard it is and that loss like that will never go away: it will always be part of you, but it will change in intensity. Every now and again, when you are feeling most vulnerable, even the strongest women can crumble and cannot cope. the ads with babies, your friends having babies, then grand children..it is not only the loss of a child in pregnancy, it is a loss of so much after that, so much in a life we miss out on.
When all of this was happening to me, I wanted to start a foundation to make people aware of this huge problem and trauma that was happening. I couldn’t, I was trying to heal myself and was angry and desperate and often too darn sick trying to beat the cancer. But please ! Something has to change. So, this week, when the posts on social media are being shared about miscarriages, #BabyLossAwarenessWeek and #Iam1in4 please speak up, do not hold it inside if you are one of those women, because you are not alone ! do not retreat, tell your story!You will be amazed how many women will tell you theirs and know that you are not alone !
Big hugs to all of you who have lost so much in silence.
You may or may not know, but one in FOUR women are experiencing miscarriages. Most of the losses are dealt with alone. Often not speaking up that they have miscarried. It is often swept under the carpet even by doctors, saying we at least know we can get pregnant and go home and try again.
Most of the suffering and having to deal with the trauma of loss and hope , is dealt with alone. This is unexeptable! I know how hard it is because I have suffered 9 miscarriages, was then diagnosed with cancer of the uterus so all hopes of ever having a baby disappeared like snow on a warm day…..
I know how hard it is and that loss like that will never go away: it will always be part of you, but it will change in intensity. Every now and again, when you are feeling most vulnerable, even the strongest women can crumble and cannot cope. the ads with babies, your friends having babies, then grand children..it is not only the loss of a child in pregnancy, it is a loss of so much after that, so much in a life we miss out on.
When all of this was happening to me, I wanted to start a foundation to make people aware of this huge problem and trauma that was happening. I couldn’t, I was trying to heal myself and was angry and desperate and often too darn sick trying to beat the cancer. But please ! Something has to change. So, this week, when the posts on social media are being shared about miscarriages, #BabyLossAwarenessWeek and #Iam1in4 please speak up, do not hold it inside if you are one of those women, because you are not alone ! do not retreat, tell your story!You will be amazed how many women will tell you theirs and know that you are not alone !
Big hugs to all of you who have lost so much in silence.
and now for something completely different: Today it is time to treat yourself to something special ! Treat yourself to some of the best fibre in the world!
Qiviut is the name of the wool that comes off of the Musk Ox, a gentle giant of a creature often found in Alaska. Once hunted to the brink of extinction, Musk Ox are now considered to have the most precious, softest fibre in the world. Eight times warmer than wool and finer than cashmere, qiviut is extremely rare, it is one of the most luxurious fibres you can choose for a garment.
The softness of Qiviut is something that must be touched to be believed! Qiviut is not only soft, it is also non-irritating to the skin, and is very durable - garments made from it are worn for years and can be hand washed in mild detergent. It retains warmth even when wet.
The lightweight fibre preserves heat in the winter, while also providing cool, breathable comfort in warmer weather. This fibre has been carefully gathered by hand and no animals were harmed in the gentle shedding of it. This fibre generally sells for anywhere between $35-$56/28grams/oz, and skeins of yarn often sell for over $100-200 each!! Fibre count is 100s+ (12-15 micron).
Qiviut is the name of the wool that comes off of the Musk Ox, a gentle giant of a creature often found in Alaska. Once hunted to the brink of extinction, Musk Ox are now considered to have the most precious, softest fibre in the world. Eight times warmer than wool and finer than cashmere, qiviut is extremely rare, it is one of the most luxurious fibres you can choose for a garment.
The softness of Qiviut is something that must be touched to be believed! Qiviut is not only soft, it is also non-irritating to the skin, and is very durable - garments made from it are worn for years and can be hand washed in mild detergent. It retains warmth even when wet.
The lightweight fibre preserves heat in the winter, while also providing cool, breathable comfort in warmer weather. This fibre has been carefully gathered by hand and no animals were harmed in the gentle shedding of it. This fibre generally sells for anywhere between $35-$56/28grams/oz, and skeins of yarn often sell for over $100-200 each!! Fibre count is 100s+ (12-15 micron).
A musk ox mum and her baby
the Qiviut (down of the musk ox) peeking through the guard hairs
Musk Ox male in Alaska
One of the baby musk ox
The mighty muskox (Ovibos moschatu) is a survivor from the ice age. Possessing powerful curved horns, which hang down like side bangs from a helmet-like skullcap, muskoxen are actually more closely related to sheep and goats than to cattle and oxen (although all of the above are members of the Bovidae family).
Adult muskoxen weigh from 180 to 400 kg (400 to 900 pounds) but they look much larger on account of their thick coats and large heads. Once muskoxen proliferated throughout the northern hemisphere alongside wooly mammoths, but hunting and habitat loss caused them to retreat further and further into the remotest parts of the north until the end of the nineteenth century when the animals could only be found in the unpopulated wilderness and empty islands of northern Canada and deep in the arctic fastnesses of Greenland. In these remote locations tiny herds of one to two dozen muskoxen still subsist on grasses, willows, lichens and moss while contending with terrible arctic predators and fearsome cold.
Fortunately the muskox is provisioned with fearsome horns and doughty neighbors to fend off polar bears and wolves. The herd is capable of assembling in a ring formation with horns outward to stand off wolves and ice bears (although such a strategy works less well against humans with our projectile weapons). To fight the cold, the muskoxen have fat reserves and one of the most remarkable insulating coats in the animal world.
A muskox’s coat is divided into two layers: a long stringy layer of coarse outer wool and an inner layer of soft warm underwool called qiviut (this Inuit word now primarily denotes muskox wool but it was once also used to refer to similarly soft warm inner down of arctic birds). Qiviut is one of the world’s premier luxury fibers: it is allegedly 8 times more effective at insulation than sheep’s wool and yet is softer than cashmere.
The Musk Ox survived when the other greats of the Pleistocene – wooly mammoth, mastodon, saber-toothed cats, giant sloth – all went away. And it returned to Alaska by way of New York Harbor. Now, it turns out, the musk ox could again be the great survivor in our new Arctic age of extinction. Ross MacPhee, a curator in the department of mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, says the musk ox’s homogenous genetic makeup suggests it has been through population stress before and can survive boom-and-bust cycles.
“What we find with living musk oxen is they’re not exactly clones, but they’re so amazingly similar that there’s only one explanation,” MacPhee says. “And that explanation is that they had to have had a very severe pinch on their populations. We estimate that that happened about ten thousand years ago.” But that doesn’t mean it’s all good news for the cold-weather beast, which is most closely related to goats and sheep and can weigh up to 800 pounds. The pace of these changes could challenge even an animal as resilient as the musk ox, scientists say.
Brendan Kelly, an Arctic ecologist and research scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says all Arctic species are currently endangered by the rapid speed of climate change. “For organisms to adapt – whether it’s changing body size, or changing the timing that they have their calves, and hence can match when the plants are most nutritious – it really depends on the rate of the environmental change relative to the generation time of the organism,” Kelly says. “So if there’s a really, really rapid environmental change, it’s very hard for there to be an adaptive response.”
As I was reading about Musk Ox I found out that all of the muskox at the Myskoxcentrum in Härjedalen, Sweden, came from Ryøya, near Tromsø, Norway. What?!? Muskox on Ryøya? I knew about the Dovrefjell group and an attempt to introduce muskox on Svalbard, but I had never heard of a group in northern Norway. The search was on.
It turns out that there is a flock of about 20 animals running around free on a small island named Ryøya off the coast of Tromsø. NRK’s Ut i naturen television program made a 24-minute show about “Moskusøya” (“Muskox Island”) in 2006. Unfortunately the show is in Norwegian, but even if you don’t speak Norwegian, it’s still worth watching for a while if you want to see muskox running around and scientists trying to catch them. In the Ut i naturen program, we also get to see some historic television clips from the 1960s when the muskox first came to Troms.
In 1969, 25 muskox calves arrived in northern Norway via boat from Greenland. The idea was to raise muskox for their wool as domesticated livestock. The University of Fairbanks in Alaska had some kind of research project related to muskox husbandry (I haven’t looked into that yet) and the idea was transferred to Norway.
The undercoat wool of muskox, known as qiviut, is a highly valuable wool: it is warmer than wool, finer than cashmere and hypoallergenic. Sounds like the perfect winter clothing material, except that muskox are pretty rare and not widely domesticated – which makes it a very, very expensive material
In 1969, the herd was established at a farm in Bardu with the hope that eventually every farm in the area could have 2-3 muskox for a meaningful supplementary income. But by 1975, calls for the end of muskox experiment were being made. According to media reports, a hunter was killed by a muskox and the muskox population was being devastated by a virus (hmmm, sounds familiar, right?). So in 1976, the herd was moved to northern Troms, and five years later, the Tromsø University is taking care of them to preserve the species.
The Department of Arctic and Marine Biology took over the herd and moved them to Ryøya to study their behaviour and adaptation as arctic animals. Muskox as livestock in Norway didn’t work out, but who knows what the future holds. The Qiviut are still here.
If you watch the TV program, you’ll see that while the scientists herd the muskox to collect measurements and/or for transportation to the overwintering station on the mainland, they quickly pull out the qiviut, which they sell to support their research. Qiviut is a bonus of having muskox in Norway — if you can catch them.
Well , don’t you worry I caught some of it for you !! to support the musk ox population growing not only on the American continent but also in other habitats that are good for them. This will enable the species to grow, get stronger, adapt and hey, probably outlive us all, since they already did that to the woolly mammoth.
Don’t worry, if I EVER find a woolly mammoth, I will share its wool with all of you …
Have a fun weekend and happy spinning, knitting, weaving, crocheting and fondling fibre !
Zombies having a field day-sold-
Sweet Dreams-sold-
Velvet-sold-
New Day-sold-
Nebula Sunset-sold-
Natural-sold-
Indigo-sold-
I’m The Doctor-sold-
The mighty muskox (Ovibos moschatu) is a survivor from the ice age. Possessing powerful curved horns, which hang down like side bangs from a helmet-like skullcap, muskoxen are actually more closely related to sheep and goats than to cattle and oxen (although all of the above are members of the Bovidae family).
Adult muskoxen weigh from 180 to 400 kg (400 to 900 pounds) but they look much larger on account of their thick coats and large heads. Once muskoxen proliferated throughout the northern hemisphere alongside wooly mammoths, but hunting and habitat loss caused them to retreat further and further into the remotest parts of the north until the end of the nineteenth century when the animals could only be found in the unpopulated wilderness and empty islands of northern Canada and deep in the arctic fastnesses of Greenland. In these remote locations tiny herds of one to two dozen muskoxen still subsist on grasses, willows, lichens and moss while contending with terrible arctic predators and fearsome cold.
Fortunately the muskox is provisioned with fearsome horns and doughty neighbors to fend off polar bears and wolves. The herd is capable of assembling in a ring formation with horns outward to stand off wolves and ice bears (although such a strategy works less well against humans with our projectile weapons). To fight the cold, the muskoxen have fat reserves and one of the most remarkable insulating coats in the animal world.
A muskox’s coat is divided into two layers: a long stringy layer of coarse outer wool and an inner layer of soft warm underwool called qiviut (this Inuit word now primarily denotes muskox wool but it was once also used to refer to similarly soft warm inner down of arctic birds). Qiviut is one of the world’s premier luxury fibers: it is allegedly 8 times more effective at insulation than sheep’s wool and yet is softer than cashmere.
The Musk Ox survived when the other greats of the Pleistocene – wooly mammoth, mastodon, saber-toothed cats, giant sloth – all went away. And it returned to Alaska by way of New York Harbor. Now, it turns out, the musk ox could again be the great survivor in our new Arctic age of extinction. Ross MacPhee, a curator in the department of mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, says the musk ox’s homogenous genetic makeup suggests it has been through population stress before and can survive boom-and-bust cycles.
“What we find with living musk oxen is they’re not exactly clones, but they’re so amazingly similar that there’s only one explanation,” MacPhee says. “And that explanation is that they had to have had a very severe pinch on their populations. We estimate that that happened about ten thousand years ago.” But that doesn’t mean it’s all good news for the cold-weather beast, which is most closely related to goats and sheep and can weigh up to 800 pounds. The pace of these changes could challenge even an animal as resilient as the musk ox, scientists say.
Brendan Kelly, an Arctic ecologist and research scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says all Arctic species are currently endangered by the rapid speed of climate change. “For organisms to adapt – whether it’s changing body size, or changing the timing that they have their calves, and hence can match when the plants are most nutritious – it really depends on the rate of the environmental change relative to the generation time of the organism,” Kelly says. “So if there’s a really, really rapid environmental change, it’s very hard for there to be an adaptive response.”
As I was reading about Musk Ox I found out that all of the muskox at the Myskoxcentrum in Härjedalen, Sweden, came from Ryøya, near Tromsø, Norway. What?!? Muskox on Ryøya? I knew about the Dovrefjell group and an attempt to introduce muskox on Svalbard, but I had never heard of a group in northern Norway. The search was on.
It turns out that there is a flock of about 20 animals running around free on a small island named Ryøya off the coast of Tromsø. NRK’s Ut i naturen television program made a 24-minute show about “Moskusøya” (“Muskox Island”) in 2006. Unfortunately the show is in Norwegian, but even if you don’t speak Norwegian, it’s still worth watching for a while if you want to see muskox running around and scientists trying to catch them. In the Ut i naturen program, we also get to see some historic television clips from the 1960s when the muskox first came to Troms.
In 1969, 25 muskox calves arrived in northern Norway via boat from Greenland. The idea was to raise muskox for their wool as domesticated livestock. The University of Fairbanks in Alaska had some kind of research project related to muskox husbandry (I haven’t looked into that yet) and the idea was transferred to Norway.
The undercoat wool of muskox, known as qiviut, is a highly valuable wool: it is warmer than wool, finer than cashmere and hypoallergenic. Sounds like the perfect winter clothing material, except that muskox are pretty rare and not widely domesticated – which makes it a very, very expensive material
In 1969, the herd was established at a farm in Bardu with the hope that eventually every farm in the area could have 2-3 muskox for a meaningful supplementary income. But by 1975, calls for the end of muskox experiment were being made. According to media reports, a hunter was killed by a muskox and the muskox population was being devastated by a virus (hmmm, sounds familiar, right?). So in 1976, the herd was moved to northern Troms, and five years later, the Tromsø University is taking care of them to preserve the species.
The Department of Arctic and Marine Biology took over the herd and moved them to Ryøya to study their behaviour and adaptation as arctic animals. Muskox as livestock in Norway didn’t work out, but who knows what the future holds. The Qiviut are still here.
If you watch the TV program, you’ll see that while the scientists herd the muskox to collect measurements and/or for transportation to the overwintering station on the mainland, they quickly pull out the qiviut, which they sell to support their research. Qiviut is a bonus of having muskox in Norway — if you can catch them.
Well , don’t you worry I caught some of it for you !! to support the musk ox population growing not only on the American continent but also in other habitats that are good for them. This will enable the species to grow, get stronger, adapt and hey, probably outlive us all, since they already did that to the woolly mammoth.
Don’t worry, if I EVER find a woolly mammoth, I will share its wool with all of you …
A Qiviut cowl, the warmest and softest thing you will ever wear
So, this week it is Qiviut !!!!
Only a small amount available so please don’t wait too long for this amazing Norwegian Qiviut fibre that wil be tha absolute softest you have ever touched in your life ! YUMMM!
Only a small amount available so please don’t wait too long for this amazing Norwegian Qiviut fibre that wil be tha absolute softest you have ever touched in your life ! YUMMM!
Have a fun weekend and happy spinning, knitting, weaving, crocheting and fondling fibre !
Please don't hesitate to contact me at any time if you have any questions okay? Always happy to enable. All my contact details are to be found at the end of this weeks blog entry. Have fun !!!
TUNDRA an exclusive IxCHeL blend with Norwegian Qiviut
Qiviut 25%, Cashmere-Silk-Organic Merino-Angora
50 gram tops $25
50 gram tops $25
Zombies having a field day-sold-Sweet Dreams-sold-Velvet-sold-New Day-sold-Nebula Sunset-sold-Natural-sold-Indigo-sold-
Dream of Roses-sold-
Have a fun weekend Creating your Dreams!
Please don't hesitate to contact me at any time if you have any questions okay? Always happy to enable.
All my contact details are to be found at the end of this weeks blog entry.
Have fun !!!
Dates to put in your Calendar !!
Monday , October 19th (10:00-3pm)
Grandvalley Spinners and weavers
A perfect fibre and craft day hosted by the Montrose spinners group : my workshop is going to be all about Navajo or chain plying and boucle yarn
How To Order:
1. You can email me on ixchel at rabbit dot com dot au or ixchelbunny at yahoo dot com dot au
2. message me on facebook or ravelry where I am Ixchelbunny.
I will email you right back with all your order details and payment methods.
Any questions? Any custom orders for yarn or dyeing fibre? Please don’t hesitate to ask! Always happy to enable.
2. message me on facebook or ravelry where I am Ixchelbunny.
I will email you right back with all your order details and payment methods.
Any questions? Any custom orders for yarn or dyeing fibre? Please don’t hesitate to ask! Always happy to enable.
Thank you so much for your help and support !
RABBIT ON !
((hugs))
Charly
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