Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Shearing 2012

We still love seeing how they look after they've been shorn,
there always seems to be more fluff to them then we remember.

After a beautiful month of May the weather in the PNW turned wet, cold and windy.  So 2012 ended up to be another year of watching the weather, watching the calendar and hoping we'll get a break so we can get the herd sheared.  Our shearer was coming from Idaho and only had 12 days of shearing in this area, which we had already helped her book it full of shearing jobs.  Any rain out days for shearing really can wreak havoc in getting the job done for everyone. 


Here's a good picture of just how long of a staple length is grown.  This is a juvenile male who was shorn last August.  In 8 months his fleece has grown close to 5 inches.  He looks quite a bit smaller then the fluffy guy in the first photo!
Sometimes it takes a minute of getting used to feeling the cool
air after having all that fleece shorn off~

We had 45 to shear this year and scheduled ourselves 2 days of the 12 day schedule.  Generally, this is 2 full days of work, with no time built in for mishaps or bad weather.  As it got closer to our first day of shearing on June 9th it was still raining and it was questionable whether we'd have any break that weekend or not.  Saturday we went for it starting with the alpacas we could lock under cover and they were fairly dry.  This group is our due soon moms, new moms with cria and yearling females.

Final touches in the ropes~
The weather Saturday actually was holding out pretty well, grey cloudy skies with occasional misting of rain.  To add to the excitment of shearing, one of the due soon moms decided to have her cria.  Quite a distraction for everyone, Ann, our shearer, at least kept on shearing the alpaca that was down in the ropes, with Whit staying in his position on the head.  This was Whisper's 5th cria, she is a good proven dam and had a text book delivery.  It was a pretty cool day and with no sun, we needed to get the cria dry and make sure she was up and nursing.  Shortly after the arrival of the new cria we started having guests who arrived to watch the shearing being done.  They were pretty thrilled with the added bonus of seeing a newly born cria! 

Saturday's new arrival, sporting her
cria rain coat~
We managed to get 20 shorn on Saturday and another 17 on Sunday.  Then the weather blew in with some historic Junuary volumes of rain.  Looking ahead at the schedule it did not seem like it was possible to get every herd shorn that was scheduled, let alone finish up our last 8.  In the end, I don't know why I worry so much.  We are in the PNW, we seem to go through this weather drama every year and every year the job somehow manages to get done.  It took us 2 additional afternoons to wrap up those last 8.  
They always have to great each newly shorn one as a completely new alpaca~
Who are you?
 

A typical annual clip of prime fleece~

Another year of shearing is done.  Always such a relief and sense of accomplishment rolled into 1 annual milestone.  Next steps are preparing and sorting the fiber for processing.  We will be trying a few new mills this year and diversifying what we do with our fiber and end products.  More to come on this when we get our processed fiber back.  In the meantime, it is always a challenge in where to store all the bags of fiber while it is waiting to be sorted and prepared for shipping.



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