Learning about fleece preparation...

This weekend, Rene' and I went to a skirting bee at another alpaca farm. It was a really good experience for both of us. Since we don't show our alpacas as regularly as we should, I am determined to start entering their blanket fiber in fleece shows and spinoff competitions.

We took one huacaya fleece and one suri fleece with us to the skirting bee. The huacaya fleece is very fluffy and it's important to pick every little piece of VM (vegetable matter) out of it that you can, as well as second cuts (shorter cuts of hair from shearing) and coarse hairs that would deduct points in competition. Basically, you want the blanket fleece you show to be the best representation of the animal. The huacaya fleece we were working on was mainly white but had some small areas of black fiber since the alpaca has a couple of small black spots. We learned that we need to take out the black fiber and just stick with the main color. The judges look for consistency throughout the entire fleece (length, color, crimp, etc) We aren't going to be showing this particular fleece we worked on, but instead were using it to learn from. We plan on selling this fiber next week to the AAFF. (Read earlier posts for more info...)

The suri fleece is a little harder to work with since it doesn't stick together like the huacaya fiber. Suri fiber is long and silky and has more individual locks. Preparing it for competition is basically the same. Make sure all of the VM or as much as possible is removed. We were separating out locks of the same length to be sent in for a spinoff competition. We needed to gather up 2 oz of similar length fiber and put it in a gallon size ziplock bag.

What happens in the competition is that a handspinner takes the sample of your alpaca's fiber and spins it into yarn. As she works with it, she'll write her comments and score it. She'll also pick out any VM and guard hairs to show you why points were taken off for those different things. In the end, you'll hopefully get a ribbon for your alpaca's fiber, but at the very least you'll get some great feedback and a cool piece of yarn spun from your fiber.

I'm excited now and I can't wait to enter and see how we do. I'll let you know in the months ahead how things go with any entries I send out.