Showing, Shearing and Spinning!

21 May 2009

What a week…

There's been no news from Toft for a while due to the chaos erupting here on farm. It all began with Badminton Horse Trials, which with a stop-gap for another 14 hour fleece sorting day, then ran straight into the Royal Windsor Horse Show and the Royal Tattoo. Having returned from Windsor late Sunday evening we kicked of three full days of shearing!

Exhausted.

All the alpacas at Toft are now clean shaven and their fleece will be heading off to the mill tomorrow. Thanks to our shearing team of Ben Wheeler and Edward along with a trusty team of sorters, animal herders and of course sweeper-upperers we powered through the 180 animals in three days. On Tuesday we had visits from Teresa Barlow, an alpaca owner who agistes her two females with Toft, and Caroline Gardner, a textile student from London. Everyone had a great time but we are all quite relieved it’s over. Good luck to guys as they head on to shear continually until the end of August when they’ll return to do our cria.

Births

Shearing is often a catalyst for births, and it definitely has been this year. My personal 'Alpaca Lord' herd has doubled in numbers as Lady Galadriel produced a gorgeous white suri cria on Tuesday. Lady Guinevere is happily running around and looks like she’ll be a really stunning suri.

Lady Guinevere was the first of four cria born over the past couple of days. The maternity paddock here at Toft now boasts eight bouncing babies for all walking the footpaths to admire. So far the male to female ratio is perfectly balanced- we'll keep you informed.

Yarn

More yarn is back in stock, and pinafore dresses and thatch knit cardigans are back in the summer colours and full range of sizes.

DK is now available in:

Cream
Oatmeal
Silver
Biscuit
Fudge
Rose Grey
Chestnut
Chocolate
Steel
Humbug

Enjoy! We are loving having so much choice again after such a colour drought!