Elizabeth, traveled to West Terre Haute this past Wednesday to help the nuns of St. Mary of the Woods College during their shearing day. From 8:00 in the morning to 7:00 or so at night they were able to shear 18 of the male alpaca herd. Another 40+ will be on the shearer's table over the next two days!

Our alpacas are here!! Big thanks to Amanda & her dad for coming over Monday evening with them to bring us some alpacas, hay & fiber. The boys had a ton of fun eating what little grass we had and figuring out how to step on the scale without spitting.  They promptly managed to eat all the grass in the holding area pasture while Scott and I sipped a nice Muscato d'asti and watched the sun set on our new alpaca adventure.

Unfortunately for the boys they didn't realize they could enter the shed and promptly got soaked that night with a heavy rain fall. Luckily on Wednesday when it rained again, they figured it out. 

Scott went out & promptly collected "magic" beans the day after they arrived and was rewarded with a half a bucket for the plants. So hopefully this trend of him cleaning the pasture continues :). Enjoy the photos of the boys and feel free to stop by and visit them.

I will be getting some fiber up in my Etsy store soon hopefully and have included some photos of my washing and drying station for fleece. I also got some wonderful 30% alpaca, 30% merino, 20% bamboo, and 20% nylon sock yarn in to do some test dying on for my future Superheros vs. Villains sock yarn club. Keep your eyes open for May for a big update in the store. 

We traveled to Magical Farms in LItchfield, OH this past weekend for a fiber weekend with Roo Klein of Moonwood Farms. We learned about dyeing with fiber reactive dyes, acid dyes and different techniques to get different looks. We also worked on blending & carding alpaca to make different types of batts and blends for hand-spinning. A session on marketing really helped to teach us more about how to promote our alpacas. We also were lucky enough to be able to take a farm tour with the manager Trip Forrester and got to take a trip down Stud Row & see all the boys. There were new babies being born every day there and we took lots of photos. See all of our photos here on Facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=115710&id=1317790985&l=022079273f

So now I'm working on carding up some of our alpacas for the May Phat fiber box, and I"ve got an order of alpaca sock yarn coming so I can start dyeing for a possible sock yarn club. Keep an eye on our etsy store for avilablity.
http://www.etsy.com/shop/spottedcircus