The start of a production line!

Today was a bit of a milestone for us as we have now purchased a Spinning Wheel and as we had always intended to produce our own alpaca garments, this will enable us to get started. Sheila had been talking about sourcing one from ebay and a couple of days ago, she found one for sale and we duly put in a bid. Some couple of days later, we found that her offer was indeed the winning bid so today, we trekked over to Thornton Heath to pick it up. After a welcomed cup of coffee and a general chat with the lovely couple who sold it to us, we headed back to rural sanity. I had totally forgotten how congested the roads around London are and how  frustrating it is to drive in amongst so many vehicles without moving very far!

We now need to source a drum carder to complete the mechanics of fleece processing on a small scale!

Since the weather appears to have dryed up now, the alpacas have been released from the barn and are now back on the grass day and night. I hope that the rain keeps away for a while now as the paddocks have suffered over the last couple of weeks.

The haylage we purchased in the summer has been well received by the alpacas and they simply cannot get enough of it.

Our elite youngsters, Navigator, Polaris, Sundown and Metisha have now been away from their mums for 4 weeks now and this weekend, we will be seperating the boys into their own paddock with Metisha going back with the remainder of the Elite Australians. We had a chance to examine all of their fleeces during this seperation period and we are simply delighted about the superb fleece they are exhibiting. When we next get a bright day, I will take some photo's of them and put them in the Blog.

We also have some Lambivac injections to do this weekend so it will be a busy Saturday and Sunday methinks!!

Signing off now but will return soon.