After a really bad weather for shearing day, we have learnt how good we are at improvising. We were able to host the alpacas indoors for the dramatic event of getting them undressed.
The process was smooth, Scott was very gentle with the animals. With a light idea gathered of little information online, I had to learn super fast to get the fleece into the cloth and my noodling developed quite quickly. The fleeces are handled so easily this way!
Two random fleeces were taken from the animal straight to the regional Fleece Education Day to serve as practice (skirting for processing or preparing them for the show), and show scoring under the BAS standards.
I did learn a lot. I do regularly research and read quite a lot about any topic that awakens my interest. My expectations weren’t great for the day, i thought I wouldn’t learn great deal. But I was proven wrong. I have to thank Jay Holland, BAS tutor judge and specialist alpaca trainer, for keeping me interested for many hours in everything he said and teaching me so very important little things to take into account. He’s good at teaching, because he’s passionate about alpacas, but I also thought he’s really nice!
I also learnt that I have misconceptions about my own animals. What I thought would be a poor fleece is actually very interesting (everyone wanted to know what animal the fleece was from). The fleece I thought was quite alright didn’t score so great.
Back home, it’s time to reflect and apply what’s learnt. Now I have all these ideas about feeding, weather, matings, shearing… a whole year to harvest one fleece. It really is a fight against the elements to get it right and come up with a good result at the end.
I find all this very exciting and motivating. I’m looking forward to skirting all my fleeces, now I’ll look at them in a new different way.
Kestle Alpacas 