Alpaca Fiber and fleece for sale

Come out to see our alpacas' fleeces!

We have blacks, browns, fawns and whites for sale. Many fleeces are from ribbon-winning animals.

Prices vary, but are generally as follows:

$3/oz for prime blanket fleeces (firsts)
$2/oz for good seconds (neck fiber)
Bags of thirds (legs and belly fiber) are FREE.

15% off the total price of whole bags of fleece.

Visit our website for more information: www.etfarms.com

Instant Alpaca Fiber Herd! - $800

Ever want a herd of fiber alpacas, but don't have a lot of money?

Here's your chance!

We need to make room for this year's crop of baby alpacas, so we are offering four (4) alpacas for the total price of $800!

Included in the price are your choice of the following male animals:

White Suri -- "Snowball" 6 years
White Huacaya -- "Duffman" 6 years
Black Huacaya -- "Dr. Hibbert" 2 years
Brown Huacaya -- "Furious George" 2 years
Brown Huacaya -- "Apu" 2 years

All of these boys have superior fiber, are halter trained and have really great personalities. They would make great 4-H projects, fiber producers, or pasture pals.

Bought separately, these animals are listed between $100 and $750 each.

To learn more about the animals and find directions to the farm, go to www.etfarms.com.

June 2011 Alpaca Fiber Sale

Alpaca Fiber Sale
at Evergreen Terrace Farms
Friday, June 17th and Saturday, June 18th 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

We have too much fiber!
We have all colors from white to browns to black (except gray).
We have fine, soft baby alpaca fleeces and tough, strong felting fleeces.
Most fleeces are raw (unskirted). Alpaca fleece does NOT need to be scoured as sheep's fleece does.

Prices depend on quality, but can be roughly broken down as follows:

$3/ ounce for Prime ( excellent quality blanket) fleeces
$2/ ounce for Seconds (good quality blankets or neck/flank of Prime animals)
FREE Thirds (black bags)

The alpacas will be on display and available for petting. Free popsicles for the kids!

Follow link for directions:
http://www.etfarms.com/contact/

What to do with Alpaca Fiber: Skirt it! Part 2/4

This is the second in a series of blog entries about what to do with alpaca fiber. These articles are taken from Paca Talk #2 “What to do with Fiber” which can be found on pacatalk.com. I’ve taken the time to expand each section a little more in these blog posts than we had time for in the podcast. These first four entries will focus on skirting a raw fleece.

In my previous post, I described how to make a skirting table. 

Once you have your skirting table, how do you skirt a fleece? Honestly, I can’t really TELL you how, but I’ll give you the basics. If you want to learn to do it, go find people who know how and watch them. I suggest asking to help them skirt fleeces for a day in exchange for a lesson. Certainly get help from someone if you are skirting a show fleece. Many show fleeces are marked down for improper skirting. 

To skirt a fleece, you must first decide what the fleece is for because skirting a show fleece is very different from skirting either a fleece for hand spinners or commercial applications. However, for all these applications your general purposes are the same: 

• remove dirt (some at least)
• remove poop
• remove big vegetation
• remove second cuts
• remove hair
• check for "tenderness"

Today, we'll talk about the first three since the others are a little more involved. 

To remove dirt, you can just spread out the fleece and bang the table a few times. This knocks out a surprising amount of dirt. You won’t find a lot of dirt in the fleeces if you used your shop vac (on “blow”) to remove the dirt just before shearing. Doing this just before shearing a show fleece isn’t recommended because it can compromise the structure of a fleece. You can do it a few days before shearing so the fiber can "reorganize" and get good results. 

Poop should be a no-brainer. Find a bean? Pick it out. Find a "smear?" Throw out the affected fiber.

"Big" VM should be removed

Big vegetable matter (VM) should be easy, too, except for that “big” qualification. My alpacas like to roll around in hay. Some places on them, especially the base of their necks, are just filled with tiny bits of hay, etc. How much work you put in to removing these bits is determined partly by the ultimate use of the fleece. If you are working on a show fleece, throw out any hunk of fleece that is badly contaminated by bits of vegetation. If the fleece is headed toward a small mill or hand spinner, do your best to get out the bits. Mills can remove a lot of VM, but remember that any VM left may end up in the yarn. 

A small amount of VM can be left in a fleece.

That's all for now! Next time I’ll describe how to deal with second cuts. 

What to do with Alpaca Fiber: Skirt it! Part 1 of 4

This is the first in a series of blog entries about what to do with alpaca fiber originally posted on thealpacaguy.com. These articles are taken from Paca Talk #2 “What to do with Fiber” which can be found on pacatalk.com. I’ve taken the time to expand each section a little more in these blog posts than we had time for in the podcast. These first four entries will focus on skirting a raw fleece.

So, let’s begin!

You’ve had a big day shearing (that was Paca Talk # 1 and #14 ), and now you have a room full of plastic bags filled with alpaca fleece. Now what?

Unfortunately, there are only a couple ways to make money from a raw, unpicked fleece in a bag: 1) sell it at a discount to a hand spinner, and 2) well, I can’t think of another way.

The point is that you need to pick your fleeces clean of debris and of second cuts before you can sell it. The first thing you’ll need is a skirting table.

Here’s a picture of my El Cheapo brand skirting table:

(I’ve since moved the whole operation to the garage). It is made of PVC pipe and 1/2 inch hardware cloth and duct tape. I have lost the “plans” but basically, you need a frame of about 3’ by 5’ of either wood or pipe. Then you need to attach the 1/2 hardware cloth to it. Hardware cloth is wire mesh, and 1/2 inch holes will allow dirt, poop and some second cuts to fall through. Then you need to set it up on legs or sawhorses. Over the years, I’ve added duct tape to the edges of the cloth to keep it from snagging fiber and an anti-fatigue mat so I don’t get so worn out standing on the concrete garage floor.

That’s all for now. Next time, we’ll talk about how to skirt a fleece!

My first contribution to The Alpaca Guy!

http://www.thealpacaguy.com/2009/07/21/fiber-skirt-1/

I'm now a contributor on thealpacaguy.com.

Hooyah!

m

Lil' Margie's gain rate

Margie is gaining about 4 ounces a day. That's half of what I'd like to see her gain. But she's bright and active, which are good signs.

Because Margie seems so sensitive to stimuli, I would hate to put her and her mama in a trailer and leave them on a strange farm for breeding. Thank fully, the person who owns the stud we want to breed Lisa to has offered to bring him to our farm so we can hand-breed them. We're close enough neighbors that this isn't too much of a problem, but there's enough distance between us that he'd rather not be driving back and forth multiple times if the first breeding doesn't take.

In other updates, Dawn will be pregnant a whole year come tomorrow. You'd think a 13 year-old dam wouldn't hold a cria this long. I have heard that one llama vet has changed his due dates this year by assuming a year plus two weeks. That would be close for all our alpacas except Cabernet, who had her baby at around 335 days this year (she's always a week or more early).

In still other news, I've picked through four or five bags of light-colored fiber. Man, I have a lot of fiber. A start is a start, though. Here's a reminder of what my fleece table looks like, though I've moved the whole operation to the garage.

That's all for now!
m