Thank you for the information on Golden Hands. It sounds like a really good magazine. I remember a little magazine called the "Work Basket" that had all kinds of crafts in it. It seems that my Grandmother got it. I somehow ended up with one or two of them, but it doesn't seem as thorough as your Golden Hands.Shylinn said:
You know how much I love this shawl Julie, I just gave one away recently. I knit 10 centre sections on mine.Lurker 2 said:
Many of us are old enough to remember when cashmere was truly a luxury item, so expensive that only the wealthiest could afford a small scarf. Suddenly in the past 15 or so years it's everywhere at very affordable prices. Curious, I wanted to know why. So I googled it. What I discovered was disturbing. Cashmere is the soft under fleece produced during the extreme cold winters in China and Mongolia. It is harvested by hand. So far, so good, okay? Now enters the need to increase supply to meet demand. In this endeavor, herds have to be increased, leading to over breeding, and decreasing the overall quality of the product. If the problem ended there, we might say "so what?". However, the impact of increasing the herds is having devastating effects on the environment. When sheep graze, their tendency is to eat the plants right down to the root, leaving nothing for regrowth. We aren't talking about a couple hundred animals destroying a few acres....the herds are huge. Their simple need for food is literally creating deserts where there used to be grasslands. The long term effects impact the entire planet. In addition, the animals themselves are suffering from lack of adequate nutrition. That's it in a nutshell. If you want to know more, you can Google like I did. There are a number of informative articles.Lurker 2 said:
I was going to ask the same question, since I have a few pygora goats that produce a luxurious undercoat over the winter. But I understand the overgrazing thing. When one of my sheep or goats is employed as a lawn mower in the yard, it heads straight for the dandelions. After eating the blooms, they gnaw the thing down to ground level. I only wish the dandelions would not return. LOL! Our small heard has cleared all of the blackberries and almost all of the thimble berries and salmon berries off the 7 acres of pasture that we have. They like the wild huckleberries: blue and red, and sallall, too. They also like to bark fruit trees and eat fir sprouts. It would be very easy to allow our property to be eaten to the ground.m_azingrace said:
