The Results Are In!!

Yay, pretty ribbons! Our first ever fleece show entries did well. Leroy received a 1st Place Blue Ribbon in the juvenile suri male indefinite color class. Lucas received a 3rd Place White Ribbon in his juvenile suri male light color class. The judge also commented that Lucas has "Great Luster!"

We didn't receive the DVD from the AFCNA Fleece Show yet, but I'm sure they are still editing from this past weekend's show. It will be nice to see the comments from the judges on the DVD. One area where I know we have to do better next time is to include more fiber. We scored low on fleece weight. I'm thinking I didn't bag enough fiber from the blanket area and may have thrown some of that fiber into my bag for leg and neck fiber during shearing.

We'll definitely get better at this, but at least our fleeces did well in spite of my mistakes! I'm really glad we finally entered a fleece show. Now that we've gotten the first one done, it doesn't seem as hard to do and we learn as we go. If you've never entered a fleece show or spin-off before, give it a try...you can't win if you don't enter.

Leroy asks...

As you know, we entered our first fleece show recently. Leroy and Lucas (left to right) aren't the only ones anxiously awaiting the results of this past weekend's AFCNA Fleece Show. Hopefully we properly prepared our entries. We'll just have to be patient for the results.

Other than that, we are waiting for a few days in a row of dry weather so that we can cut and bale more hay. We had a lot of heavy rain this past week and I admit, we really needed it. But now, we need some baling weather. There's a 70% chance of rain tomorrow so we won't be cutting any hay tonight for weekend baling. That's probably alright since the temperature is supposed to get into the 90's over the weekend. It's not fun stacking hay in hot temps like that! Maybe next week will be better.

First Time Fleece Show Entries

Wow! It was a lot of work but we skirted two fleeces for the 2009 AFCNA Continental Fleece Show coming up in Gettysburg, PA, this weekend. This is very new to us because we have never before entered a fleece show competition. I'm really excited to find out how things turn out.

What is even more exciting is the fact that they will be sending us back a DVD (at no extra cost) showing the fleece judging as well as all of the seminars at this weekend's event. Even though we won't be there in person, we'll still get to see all the seminars. Even better -- or not -- we'll get to watch as the judges look over our fleece entries and make their comments. Good or bad, it will be a learning experience for us. If the comments are bad, we'll know better next time.

PHOTOS: The "golden" fleece in the box above belongs to our now 12-month old suri male, Luxor's Lucas. I'm worried that as a suri fleece I may have let it get too "fluffy" in preparation. His flat lock style was more connected and actually fell off in more of a blanket as I hand sheared him.

In contrast, our 10-month old suri male, HPF Leroy had all individual pencil locks in his fiber. This photo doesn't quite do it justice since the sky was so overcast as I snapped the picture on my back porch. Although the photo makes it look like a mop, it really is beautiful to see in person.

Both entries are different from each other so we'll have to just wait and see how each of them fares in the fleece show. As they say, you can't win if you don't enter. We took a blue ribbon in our first spin off competition...maybe we'll be just as pleasantly surprised in the fleece competition. When we hear the results, you'll be the first to know!

Our first fleece show

The AFCNA Continental Fleece Show will be held in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, August 1-2. It doesn't look like I'll be attending, but our farm will be represented.

This will be our first time entering a fleece show competition and I now need to get moving on skirting those entries! I want to make the early bird deadline of July 11th to save money on entry fees. That gives me one whole month to pick out all the vegetation and pack up our fleeces. ... Plenty of time, right?!

A cool thing about this show is that they will include a free DVD with judges comments about why they scored each fleece a certain way. So even though we most likely will not attend the show in person, we'll get to see the fleece show and the seminars. What a great bonus for entering the show!

Beautiful, sunny day today at the farm with more sunshine in the forecast!