Fiber Fun Friday -- A Year's Worth of Fiber

I haven't had a lot of fiber projects going on this week because this week has been all about the fiber. It's shearing time! A year's worth of fiber growth ready to be taken off.

Jim spent the beginning of the week getting the barn prepped for shearing, but I had a different task in mind. Since I still have lots and lots of fiber bags left from last year, I decided to spend an entire afternoon randomly dyeing the white fleeces. Knowing I had tons more whites coming up, it seemed like a fun way to experiment with some new colors.

Here are some of them. All dyed using Greener Shades dyes. These dyes are AWESOME!! Up until now I've been using the colors straight from the bottle, but this time I began mixing some to make new colors. I was even smart enough to write the color formulas down. The trick, of course, will be to see if I can duplicate them again.

Anyway, shearing day arrived and this is what we woke up to. I felt like screaming! Wet alpacas....gross and hard to shear.





Thankfully, the rain didn't last all day and we were able to shear inside the barn. It kept the wet grossness to a minimum that way.

Day 2 of shearing came with some clouds, but by afternoon the sun was out. Yippee!! I felt so bad though that our visitors didn't get to see a whole lot of shearing day since we were crammed inside. I had great plans to bring out the spinning wheel and some alpaca stuff, but with so much rain it just didn't happen. I hope they at least had some fun and were able to learn to love the 'pacas a little.

A big thank you to the Alpaca Barber!! He did a wonderful job and always makes this chore fun.

Now I'm going to have to get used to looking at my herd in their naked state. It's so hard to tell them apart right now, but give me a day or two and I'll have it all figured out again.

Oh, do you think I have enough fiber to keep me busy for awhile?? There's more than 100 pounds in that bathtub waiting for me.