Toronto English Angoras

The rabbit show takes place in the Ring of Excellence Once a year, the country comes to the city. That's the tagline that I remember for the Toronto Royal Agricultural Winter Fair as it was advertised when I was a kid. RAWF is a large indoor fair with tons of crowds attending, international horse competitions, all sorts of agricultural displays, vendors, farm animals, as well as food and animal competitions.  Scope of this event, all held indoors at the gorgeous historical CNE Coliseum building, built in 1921 The Royal rabbit competition runs under the Dominion Rabbit and Cavy club rules, a Canadian rabbit breeders association older than ARBA. While the rabbit show itself might not be the biggest one in Ontario based on the number of entries, it is quite the event to experience given the grand venue and never ending crowds of onlookers.  Helen being a wonderful demo bunny Helen and her wool after the shave This time I only brought 3 angoras. Two entered in the show and one to shave

This is something I made a couple years ago and still get people asking me for details on how it was made. If you would like to make one of these for yourself, here is how I did this. I made this duvet as a gift for my parents and they have been using it all year round and loving it. This is a wonderful way to use up any short clippings from your angora or to make something from your angora wool if you do not know how to spin it into yarn.  I started out by making a few tiny test sized pillows stuffed with various amounts of fiber of different lengths. I put those through a few washer and dryer cycles to see how they would fair. The ones with longer fiber did end up felting and creating various clumps which would have made the end product unusable. However the ones that were filled with finely shredded wool did just fine. So the key to making this project last long term is to use wool which ideally is around half an inch in length, up to an inch. At this length the wool turns into a so