Skirting Fleeces

On Saturday morning, July 11th, I attended a fleece skirting workshop hosted by New Era Fiber of Middle Tennessee. Bringing the five fleeces that arrived with our alpacas in April, I skated in the door just a tad late to see about this “skirting” stuff. My goals were to learn how to skirt a fleece and to leave with one or more show quality fleeces, especially for the younger males. Showing alpacas not only involves time, money, and knowledge still beyond my ability but also it carries an element of risk because the collected animals at any show may bring along diseases from multiple farms. So far I am not ready to show my animals; however, one can show a fleece without bringing the animal off of the farm. Showing a fleece provides the owner with feedback on the fleece quality and possibly awards with which to market the animal. I was hoping for the whole enchilada.

Turns out that skirting a fleece means removing the less-than-optimal parts—possibly “seconds”—to create a “blanket” of “firsts” or a collection of the optimal fiber from each animal’s shearing. Crowded around a skirting table, or a framed netting that supports the whole fleece and either stands on legs or sits atop another table, the assemblage of students represented about a half-dozen Middle Tennessee alpaca farms. When I noticed that I was one of the younger participants, I was tickled. (It seems that I’ve been an “older student” for so long, to rejoin the young set was refreshing.)

We were shown a number of fleeces and encouraged to help sort through the fiber as we came to understand the task. Bits of vegetable matter (leaves, hay, seeds and such) needed to be picked out as did the short fibers produced when a shearer went back to “clean up” an area of the fleece. (Unfortunately, making the sheared animal look smoother is detrimental to the final shorn fleece.) We learned to piece together fleeces, to turn them over, and to bag them for show or for storage. We looked at both huacaya and suri fleeces—huacayas being the puffy, fluffy looking type of alpaca and suris being the alpacas with silky locks that hang from the body. Each fleece showed three layers of color, even for animals of a single color because the outermost fibers have the most environmental exposure, the middle fibers collect dirt, and the fiber closest to the animal shows the coat’s unsullied color. The most beautiful colored fleece we saw glowed apricot on the outer layer; we learned this color is “Georgia white” because the red clay soil stains white fleeces a peachy-orange shade.

The workshop was scheduled to run for just a few hours, but I went along for a tour of the new fiber mill afterwards and did not wind up heading home until evening. The day had been full. Although I had unloaded about a quarter of the trailer full of hay before the workshop, I had the rest of the job waiting for me when I got home, Or, I expected to have the rest of the job waiting—and was delighted to find the remainder of the hay had been moved in my absence! That provided a welcome end to a very good day.