Today's highlight : AA's Cinnamon

Today I would like to write a few proud words about one of my favorite girls, AA's Cinnamon.

Many years ago I used to breed and show Satin Angoras, red being one of my favorite colors.

I always missed that color in my rabbitry and on my spinning wheel after trading in the Satin breed for Giant.

A few years ago I was offered a sibling pair of red French angora crosses, with a few purebred reds in the pedigree as well as a few crosses. Well, I spend 3 years so far to improve on the wool production ( the original doe has space wool with too much guard hair which is short, and not a lot of under wool, her type isn't bad ) and keep the color. NOT an easy project when you have one animal to work with. I bred the original doe ( didn't keep the buck due to type faults and color faults) to several REW , densely wooled Bucks, and kept the best offspring that was either fawn, tort or red. Then it was time to breed back to mom, to get more red coloring, and then breed siblings to each other ( same mom, different Dads). I want to keep good type, keep good clean rufus red color with as little if no smut if possible, and improve on density and length of wool . So far I have one awesome fawn buck out of the crossings ( by that I mean purebred French bred into the red line to improve on wool AND to clean up pedigree ) , his name is AA's Joshua, and his density is very nice, color is very nice and his type is awesome. I also have kept one red Doe out of the second generation breeding here in my rabbitry, her name is AA's Cinnamon. She has 100 % clean red color, a reddish beige belly , nice beige eye circles, her second baby coat was long and dense, her first adult coat now is growing in with a lot of red guard hair, but, I have hopes that she'll grow a nice long coat with better density then her grand Mom. Cinnamon was bred to my fawn buck ( half brother ) for her first breeding, and produced a very nice litter of 6 babies. She did great as a first time mom and is nursing her babies well. Off course she's eating like a horse right now, 3 cups of pellets per day plus hay plus herbs.

She had 5 red babies and one REW baby. The litter looked like this on day 1

You can see the red color on the red babies, and the fat white baby laying across the bunch on the top. Now the litter is almost 3 weeks old, and here is a snapshot that I took last night in the rabbitry while cleaning and feeding, and having my camera with me for a few none posed, spur of the moment type pictures.

This is Cinnamon in her cage, nest box in the back ground, and one of her little babies had hopped out of the box to investigate what all the noise was about. Off course at this age I prefer the babies to stay in the box, their little feet slip through the floor wire and can get caught, so I took the picture and placed baby back into the box. A few more days, and they will all be out of the nest and it will be time to line the cage floor with something soft and solid.
You can see how the baby already shows Mom's nice dark rufus red color. Cinnamon was clipped before being bred, so her wool hasn't grown in yet, I will post pictures of her wool once it has reached it's potential length . Can't wait to have more reds in the rabbitry to spin yarn from and place a few reds on the show table in the Fall.
A few of the babies from this litter will be for sale, can not possibly keep an entire litter, contact me if you are interested in owning a nice red FA with a now purebred pedigree.