Alpaca School, City to Surf
My alpaca education advanced a little bit more on Saturday, when I attended a workshop on fleece preparation. Taught by someone from the national fleece marketing body, it covered characteristics to try to breed for, how to keep the fleece in good condition while it's still on the animal and avoid contamination in the shearing shed, how to work with the shearer and separate the fleece roughly into its different parts as the animal is being shorn, how to pick up a fleece and throw it onto a skirting table (quite technical!), and finally how to "skirt" or separate the coarser parts from the better quality fleece and then pack and label the different parts correctly for transport. At the national fleece facility, they separate fleeces into 117 different categories and while they don't expect breeders to be that exact, they do expect that you'll have divided the fleece into three or four different qualities/potential uses before sending it. On one level it's very simple ("put the neck in a separate bag") but on another it'll take a lot of experience to be able to correctly identify the different kinds of hairs on a wide range of fleeces.
The alpaca industry has highly amusing terminology (such as "unpacking" for giving birth, "machos" for males, "spit-off" for initial pregnancy testing) and I learned what may be the best one yet at the workshop: "veggie fault"! This is the term for fleece that has too much vegetable matter like sticks, burrs and chaff in it to have much commercial value. Unfortunately little Sherry, coming up to her first shearing in October, is currently pretty much completely covered in Veggie Fault. The younger, finer animals pick up far more debris than the older ones with slightly coarser fleece.
The Australian industry is still in its early stages and the speaker described the disappointment when the national body accumulated what they thought was a top-quality, super-fine bale of white fleece and sent it to a premier spinning company, with the aim of marketing it to the very top end of the fashion market. The spinner spun a tiny bit and sent it all back, saying it wasn't good enough to use their equipment on because it had the odd dark hair in amongst the white. Apparently that causes dyes to take unevenly and shows up as a slightly different texture in the fabric, but many "solid white" animals have some almost invisible dark hairs. The quality of Australian alpacas has improved amazingly in 15 years, but still has a long way to go! It's believed that the quality of fleece in the 1500s, before the Spanish decimated the original herds, was far superior to today's.
Because no post that mentions alpacas is complete without an animal picture,
Ran the City to Surf on Sunday in my slowest-ever time by almost two minutes, but felt a little better about it when I learned the winners were well down on previous times, too. It was the windiest and rainiest it's been in the five years I've done it. I hoped the weather would cause some of the walkers who feel the need to start in the middle of the runners to stay at home, but there were still plenty of them. These people should be, if not taken out and shot, at least taken out, mildly electrocuted and moved to the back. I'd tell them all exactly what I thought of their obstructiveness if there weren't so many of them and I wasn't busy running up a hill. You do as much zigging and zagging in the race as running forward.
And just because the camelids get all the limelight these day, here's one of App taking life easy.
The alpaca industry has highly amusing terminology (such as "unpacking" for giving birth, "machos" for males, "spit-off" for initial pregnancy testing) and I learned what may be the best one yet at the workshop: "veggie fault"! This is the term for fleece that has too much vegetable matter like sticks, burrs and chaff in it to have much commercial value. Unfortunately little Sherry, coming up to her first shearing in October, is currently pretty much completely covered in Veggie Fault. The younger, finer animals pick up far more debris than the older ones with slightly coarser fleece.
The Australian industry is still in its early stages and the speaker described the disappointment when the national body accumulated what they thought was a top-quality, super-fine bale of white fleece and sent it to a premier spinning company, with the aim of marketing it to the very top end of the fashion market. The spinner spun a tiny bit and sent it all back, saying it wasn't good enough to use their equipment on because it had the odd dark hair in amongst the white. Apparently that causes dyes to take unevenly and shows up as a slightly different texture in the fabric, but many "solid white" animals have some almost invisible dark hairs. The quality of Australian alpacas has improved amazingly in 15 years, but still has a long way to go! It's believed that the quality of fleece in the 1500s, before the Spanish decimated the original herds, was far superior to today's.
Because no post that mentions alpacas is complete without an animal picture,
Ran the City to Surf on Sunday in my slowest-ever time by almost two minutes, but felt a little better about it when I learned the winners were well down on previous times, too. It was the windiest and rainiest it's been in the five years I've done it. I hoped the weather would cause some of the walkers who feel the need to start in the middle of the runners to stay at home, but there were still plenty of them. These people should be, if not taken out and shot, at least taken out, mildly electrocuted and moved to the back. I'd tell them all exactly what I thought of their obstructiveness if there weren't so many of them and I wasn't busy running up a hill. You do as much zigging and zagging in the race as running forward.
And just because the camelids get all the limelight these day, here's one of App taking life easy.