Yesterday was shearing day, although not much actual shearing happened. Dar worked her butt off to get the barn ready for the addition of the shearing table, the big livestock scale, and the sorting table for skirting the shorn fleece. We had hoped to have five of the guys sheared, but it ended up with only Hannibal and Valentino - and only Hannibal was actually sheared. Valentino was hand cut with special scissors. The woman doing the shearing was new at it in general, and ours were the first suris that she'd done. It was supposed to take about 20 minutes per animal, but Hannibal alone was almost an hour. Poor stressed out alpaca! Poor stressed out Dar! She's decided that we're going to hand cut the rest of them. We're going to need a chute to contain them, so we'll have to wait until we get our hands on one of those.
I worked on skirting the fleece with Suelaine (one of our alpaca breeder friends), while everyone else held Hannibal down on the shearing table. (I think there were six people involved in that.) Hannibal's fleece is incredible! Silky soft - just wonderful to the touch. And, being Hannibal, loaded with bits of straw and hay. I swear that he sweats the stuff. Val's fleece is going to be entered into a national fleece competition, so Suelaine - who's an expert at skirting - did his. Gorgeous, gorgeous fleece on that boy, too.
Everything came to a halt when a thunderstorm came through. You can't shear a wet alpaca, so that put an end to the festivities. Plus, I don't think that Dar could take anymore. Q was pretty stressed out, too. Me? I had to head back inside after a few hours because my legs were giving out on me, and I was starting to shake from being overtired and overheated. All in all not the most successful day.
I didn't get any pictures of the shorn Hannibal or Val because my hands were shaking too much, but I did get a pre-shearing shot, and as an added bonus a funny pic of Q's cranky boy cat, Pico. He's a character :)
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