Needles on the Move

We finally got to the fleeces in the shed yesterday - there were some duds of course, as is to be expected, but there were some gems among the bags as well. None of the wool fleeces were worth keeping, except one lovely black crossbred:

I didn’t put any in my pile though because it’s really a little bit short.

The Alpaca fleeces were great. We don’t know much about them, but if they were given to the shearer then we can probably assume they are from guard animals. Yet a couple of them were as good as any Alpaca I’ve seen apart from cria fleeces. A big pile just may have found its way into my suitcase.

This was probably the best one:

A lovely caramel colour and beautifully soft. There was also a couple of white ones, and another light tan.

I took my bits from the neck, I’m pretty sure these animals had two years between shearing and the saddle was about 8 inches long! There were also a few lovely suri fleeces and I pinched a bit of that to bring home too.

After we finished drooling over fleece (and getting very dusty and grotty), we headed over to visit Serena, my new friend from spinning group. You know those people you meet where you suddenly feel like you’ve known each other for ever and talk for hours and hours… We had a fantastic afternoon talking about spinning, and music and teaching and sheep and eating chocolate cake!

We were also lucky enough to be able to visit some of their Merinos:

And more importantly, some freshly shorn fleeces:

The top one is from a new ram, and measures 13.5 microns. They’re very excited to see what his lambs turn out like this year. The second is another ram fleece (with Serena’s legs, yes, we’re all wearing shorts as it was about 35 degrees yesterday). I scored me a little pile of that one to bring home :-D

Serena and Mark are considering holding back a few of their fleeces for the handspinners’ market, if you’re interested drop me a line and I can let them know what sort of demand there is.

Today it’s a lot cooler thankfully, I’ve caught up on ravelry and emails, and my only problem now is how to get all this fleece home to London :-D

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 2:03 am and is filed under Blogging from Down Under, Fibre Animals, Fibre is good for you. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.