We've finished shearing!

Today, we completed all of our shearing. We finished up this weekend with our four "llama ladies". Two of them are older and easy to shear and the other two are younger and wild when those clippers come near them. Luckily this year things seemed to work out well.

Check out this picture on Saturday showing Gwendolyn with her shorn body and full growth on her neck. This is actually the best we've done with her as we usually do a barrel cut - just shearing around her middle. This year we were able to shear her back end as well, but fell short of shearing her neck. Behind her in the photo is Sylvia prior to being shorn.

We were prepared to take a beating from Sylvia while we sheared her. However, I think she was ready to have all of that heavy fiber shorn so she actually remained pretty still for most of her shearing today. We were very happy that she even allowed us to shear her neck. Maybe she's actually maturing... Here's a photo of the final outcome.

Over the last month or so, we have shorn a total of 13 alpacas and 7 llamas. We took it step by step and sheared from 2 to 5 animals per weekend. Some people may do their animals all at once, but it's easier on our backs to spread it out over several weekends. Plus we can try to get other weekend projects done too. It was a great sense of accomplishment to have the shearing completed before the end of June.

Now we can concentrate on making hay... hopefully the weather will stay sunny and dry for a few days to allow cutting, drying and baling this week.