Shearing time is upon us again! Friday we where joined by three other farms as a local shearer went to work on our alpacas (thanks Paul!). Of course I meant to get pictures, but, uh, well I forgot, so no visual aids for this blog. I’ll post some post-shearing photos of the gang in while.
We just had Paul shear out three yearling boys, as we may want to show their fleeces this year and he gets the fleece off so much prettier than we do. Saturday and Sunday, Brian and I went to work on the rest of the herd. We decided this year to just take our time and do a couple of animals each day and spread the shearing out over several weekends. We managed to get all the boys finished and about half the girls, and still had time to go out for lunch on Sunday. Next weekend we’ll finish up the girls and maybe get the crias done. Then it’s skirting and sorting and deciding what fleece will end up as what finished product! I love this time of year.
In between all this, I’ve been busy with my goal of clearing out the backlog of fleeces from previous years. My plan is to not have any stray old fleeces lying around with no purpose. To that end, I’ve been getting a batch ready to send out to be made into socks. Hopefully we’ll get those back in time for this years holiday season. I also will be sorting through all those bags of seconds that have been piling up, in the hopes of getting some rugs made. The test run is just about ready and we should be seeing the first rugs back in the next couple of weeks. I can’t wait.
We’re also exploring a possible felting project. And of course, we’ll be spinning up as many of the ultra fine royal baby fleeces as we can!
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