Had an idea and wanted to run it by everyone for input, toss it around a bit. Has anyone ever partnered up with another farm (or chicken lady, etc) to expand their flock? Such as, one person has a lot of extra room on their property, and the other doesn't but doesn't mind building coops and...
Where are you located? I could use some standard-sized silkies (don't mind if they are pure, since I would be using them to skip a gen or two in my cross-breed project... I'm going for larger size than bantam.) Are you in the US, or?
So far my crosses have been just a little bigger than bantams, when pairing a silkie to a regular. I don't think you'll get a standard size bird from the first cross. You'd have to breed the cross bird with a standard size bird, for larger chicks.
You always have a much darker chick from a silkie roo over a normal hen, than a normal roo. My silkie roo over EEs gives me dark gray skinned chicks, with a rare black-skinned every once in a while. :)
For example - here is a photo of a pet quality Silkie roo. You can see his deep red wattles and brown leakage. In the lower saturation photo, they look about the same color as your Cemani pic - but you can still see that the background has brown dirt, etc. It just looks washed out, same as your...
We didn't say that they were black and white, but that your camera was on low saturation (or terrible lighting, or etc, so only some color is in the photo). It's just obviously not a natural color photo of the bird. We aren't saying you are lying. I suggest just uploading a photo of your cemanis...
I know that they are the partner of the ebay person; what I was saying is that they are still trying to show fibro quality with the de-saturated photo.