Perhaps I have too much time on my hands... or when experiments fail

February 17, 2021

Emmy grows a winter coat as if her ancestors were roaming the frozen Mongolian steppe rather than running around the hot Arabian desert. It is an extremely think and an extremely long coat. It is also extremely soft and feels very much like a minky blanket. Everyone who has ever petted her in her full winter glory just wants to bury as much of themselves as possible in her soft fuzziness. This is great until February. February is when she starts to blow her coat. It is a crazy time to start significant shedding because February is not typically a warm month, but I think she starts so early because in order to have a summer coat by the warm weather she has to start early. There is just so much hair.

Hair that comes out in great tufts if you are rubbing her. Hair that gets all over everything. At least with winter gear on, the outside is all nylon and her hair doesn't stick to it. I spend the month of March totally covered in Emmy's hair. Anyway, as I was looking at the amazing amount of hair in my hand this morning, I thought, "Hmmm... she is so soft... the hair is not super short... she's been covered by a blanket so is relatively clean... I wonder if you can spin horse hair." So I brought a handful inside to do just that.

(This is not, perhaps, as odd as it could be. I do own a book titled Spinning with Dog Hair. Hand spinners spin all sorts of fiber.)

Here is what I started with.

So the first step was to card it into something that could be spun. I put some on my hand cards and quickly realized that there was no way I was going to be able to spin it by itself. It was not clinging together and was falling out of the cards. I was going to have to blend it with something. So I grabbed some of my magical never-ending pink Merino and added that to the cards. Eventually, I ended up with what is called a rolag, which is the thing you create with your hand cards to spin from. At this point, my hopes of this little endeavor ending positively were plummeting. Emmy's hair was not mixing terribly well with the merino wool.

Thanks to my new, better spinning wheel, I was actually able to spin this mixture of horse hair and merino wool. I spun a fraction of the rolag and decided to call it quits. Even if I did create enough yarn to use, it would be nothing that you would want touching any part of your bare skin. Here is the yarn I spun. The merino twisted nicely into yarn, but you can see for yourself what the horse hair did. It got caught enough to stay, but is sticking out in all directions. This would be extremely uncomfortable with the added bonus that you would be constantly shedding horse hair as it worked its way out of the yarn. Just not good.

So, I decided this was not something that was worth pursuing. For the rest of the morning, I did pay for my curiosity. First, if you have a light colored horse, do not try this wearing dark colored clothes.

I then spent the next 45 minutes tediously taking all of the horse hair that remained in my hand cards.

On the plus side, I can blissfully drop all of Emmy's shed hair onto the ground without having a slightly guilty feeling that perhaps I could be doing something with it all. I now know for an absolute fact, that no, there is nothing I could be doing with it.