Misty's big baby!

It wasn't easy taking this photo of our newest cria this morning. The girls all crowded around him and protected him from the camera as soon as I took his jacket off for the pictures.

We've haven't decided on a name yet -- last weekend we were calling him "Charlie" -- but I'm now thinking of calling him "Monster" because he's getting so big. I weighed him yesterday afternoon and he's gained FIVE POUNDS at only one week old. He was 14.8 pounds the day he was born and yesterday he weighed an even 20 pounds!

Our little monster is such a sweet, inquisitive and energetic cria and his suri fiber looks great so far.

This second photo shows all the alpaca and llama ladies crowding around "Monster" as I tried to take his picture. Seriously, he's in the middle of that crowd -- they even managed to hide his legs from me!

While I was out taking pictures, I checked out a couple of the girls to see how long their fiber has grown since shearing them this spring. It's amazing to see how fast that fiber grows out. They are all ready for the cool temperatures of the fall and will have even longer fiber by the time winter sets in. Nature really does take care of these beautiful animals.

Oh Boy!

Misty's new cria arrived this morning...and it's another boy! We now have over 50% male alpacas at our farm. I don't know why we are having so few female crias over the last few years...

Anyway, back to our new baby boy...he's a beautiful fawn colored suri and he's very healthy. This little guy was standing and trying to nurse from his mom within 20-30 minutes after he hit the ground!

As you see in the photo above, the new cria has the pink jacket on that Victor has been wearing for the past few weeks when it's cool outside. Our next larger size cria coat is green so Victor will get that one if he needs it. We washed the pink jacket this morning and then I rubbed the outside of the jacket all over the new cria before putting it on him. I wanted to make sure his mom was comfortable with the smell of the jacket before I put it on her new cria.

Both mom and cria are comfortably relaxing in their own private stall. It's cool and rainy outside today so I'll wait a day or so before letting Misty and her cria outside with the other alpacas.

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!

Hand shearing suri alpacas

Today, I finally made time to hand shear Leroy and Lucas, our two youngest suri boys. It took me just under four hours to get them both done. Check out the photo of Lucas above that I took after shearing him. The inset is a photo I took of him just a couple of days ago.

This second before and after photo is a close up of Leroy's fiber. Again the shorn photo is from this afternoon and the photo of Leroy's long locks was taken just a few days ago.

I have to say I'm very pleased with the beautiful job on these guys! Rick and my mom agreed. They look almost as though I used the electric clippers, but I actually used really good, sharp (Fiskar) scissors.

This wasn't my first time hand shearing. The first couple of alpacas I hand sheared several years ago, I had given them a layered look. This time I tried a different technique in order to give them a more uniform length. Rather than cutting straight across horizontally, I cut from the top of the back and down. I pulled out each section of fiber and cut straight down, trying to cut at the same length all the way down. It's difficult to describe in words and unfortunately I was unable to take pictures as I did it.

Fortunately, both Leroy and Lucas were relatively cooperative. They did get a little nervous when I sheared their legs and close to any "important parts" but otherwise they were very well behaved. I was hoping to get photos of their really shiny, lustrous fiber close up, but they both decided to roll in the dirt after we let them back out in their pasture...before I got the camera out!

So this officially wrapped up our shearing season. Now it's time to skirt the blanket fiber and prepare it for the fleece show.