Tuesday 29 May 2012

Wow!

 This is Amber who was discovered running around behind her white mum.
This is Ariadne who is out of our lovely light fawn girl Olympic Consuela.

We are now up to six cria on the ground, two girls and four boys. We now have Adam, Aragon, Arthur, Ariadne, Amber and Austin. All beginning with A as this is the first proper year of births.

Margaret and I visited the Devon County show and enjoyed catching up with our friends in the Alpaca area and we had a good look at a lot of the top animals.
We also had a good look at the Bowford Merinos which have incredibly fine wool with an amazing crimp.
I took a sample over to Chas and Rachael and told them it was from an Alpaca male owned by some friends of ours and they fell for it until I confessed what I had done! Sorry !

The annoying thing was that although they were on display their is no hope of actually getting any stock as the breeder is not selling any.

Yesterday we visited Classical Mile End Alpacas and partook in a fibre day to brush up our knowledge on all things fibre related. We had Chas in the morning on understanding the tecnical stuff and then Rachael at the sorting table on preparing fleeces for processing followed by a talk by Jean Field on the uses of fibre and avoiding some of the pitfalls associated with processing.

We also collected our stunning new male CME Tantalus who is a white Jaquinto son out of a coloured line on the dams side. We are informed that this will make him an excellent choice for white and coloured girls so we will have to wait and see next year.
The size of this male is incredible and he has amazing coverage down his legs.

I will post a picture when we can take one that does him justice as it is difficult to give an indication of just how strong and heavy boned he is.

Margaret has had her first felting day here with Lou Tonkin and the smile on her face revealed just how much she enjoyed it. They made a felted Guinea pig each and also some felted slippers. Margaret has since tried to needle felt a guinea pigs face on the slippers but she thinks it looks more like a monster.
We now need to get Lou back to fine tune the technique and increase Margaret's knowledge of felting.
If anyone is looking for a felting teacher we can't recommend Lou enough.

Oh and in the midst of all this we have shorn the sheep to get them ready for moving to a new field we have rented.

That's all for now.

Nigel.