Alpaca Fleece Education

Shearing Season 2010

Fleeces-to-Go highly recommends that you prepare and plan for this most important day of dealing with fiber! Your shearer will make or break the quality of not only your show fleeces but your annual overall harvested fiber for processing!
Follow these ideas and tips for a smooth shearing day:

#1. Have all your preplan activities done before shearer arrives, bags and labels ready, alpacas groomed and ready, your shearing help there and everyone knows their duties for the day. Have refreshments for your help during shearing and we always have a lunch ready afterwards for everyone.

#2. Talk with your shearer prior to starting and insist they take their time and none to very little second cuts. Decide if shearing light to dark or vice versa.

#3. If not sure on a show blanket, have them shear it as a show blanket then decide afterwards when you have time to evaluate it.

#4. For Huacaya, keep that show blanket intact the best you and your shearer can. Don't let help or shearer start tearing it apart!

#5. Have shearer pull histogram from side you designate and put in baggie. Have label already filled out so sample and label go in the baggie at the same time then ready to mail.

#6. If not having show fleeces prepped, then highly recommend having you fiber sorted and graded. The quality of your finished products will be well worth the effort and expense of
having this done.

Good Luck with this years shearing day
  

How to Evaluate Your Fleece Scorecard!
When you first look at your scorecard remember this is an absolute scoring system.  A perfect fleece will earn a score of 100. The scoring then is deducted based on faults detected in the fleece.  A score of 50 means that fleece probably on a whole is average.  Anything above 50 would reason to say it is an above average fleece.  The next step then is to look at the individualized points awarded for the judged characteristics.  Again reason that any score 50% or above means average to above average.

I recommend you enter your fleeces in several shows during the year. Enter for different judges, regions, and levels so you get a well rounded evalution!

You can then start to look at each characteristics point and see what you need to breed  for your next generation. Use this data along with the upcoming EPDs that are currently being generated to make scientifically and well thought out breeding decisions that will increase your fleece quality for your next
level of crias!

Good Luck and remember to let Fleeces-to-Go help manage
your fleeces!

Do you know the fleece terms and do you understand the key characteristics for evaluating fleece and how these affect your overall score in fleece show competitions?

Currently working on, check back soon!!!

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