Here we are a week into October and all of us, human & camelid, are loving the weather! Mornings are crisp and cool, afternoons are warm, it’s been dry and sunny for several days and the nights have been the best for sleeping! Being a person that appreciates being able to layer on clothes and huddle under blankets in the winter I guess that autumn must be my favorite season.
A group of six farms who also happened to be friends have organized into the Virginia Alpaca Consortium. Our new website, one that I had a part in creating I might add 
, is The BestAlpacasInVirginia.com. We are currently waiting for our Marketplace to be set up – once that happens you will find alpacas for sale and herdsires for use from all of our farms. It’s a way for us to offer large farm numbers and small farm service. Folks purchasing from us will not only get mentors from the actual farm they purchased from but also from the other five farms. We are pretty excited about this!
Spent last weekend at the State Fair of Virginia. Each year friends Teri Phipps of Fireweed Alpacas and Hank Boyd & Linda Polak of All About Alpacas spend many hours preparing for the first weekend of the fair when the alpacas have their biggest presence of the fair run. Last year the weekend was on National Alpaca Farm Days; not the case this year so we called it Virginia Alpaca Farm Days instead. There were about 15 breeders, give or take, who set up alpaca pens and vendor spaces where alpaca made products were sold. Aside from talking with a lot of people about alpacas and working with their fiber it was a wonderful weekend of camaraderie among the breeders.
Through out the weekend demonstrations of spinning took place in our tent along with felting demonstrations in the craft tent. Linda P and I demonstrated needle felting. I made a little needle felted pig who we affectionately named “Too Tall”. Legs were a bit out of proportion! Linda started needle felting a hat – a project she has been meaning to do for the longest time!
On Saturday evening and again on Sunday morning Linda coordinated a Fashion Show of alpaca wearable items, some handmade but more machine made & offered for use by Lanart, a distributor/manufacturer based in North Carolina and Peru. The shows went well and one of the favorite models was Royal Flush (Teri’s alpaca) who showed up in his tux and spats. What fun that was!
Back to the real world now that fair is over for us…. Cheyenne is due with her Amerikhan Legend cria and Tabitha with her cria from The Sheriff soon. Cheyenne is on day 322 of her gestation and Tabitha, day 309. We have the cria coats ready! The Deputy who started out following a gestation of only 311 days at 12 pounds with no teeth weighed in yesterday at 19.5 pounds on his 18th day. His teeth are in, his ears have become alpaca ears and he is a true instigator out in the yard pushing the young ones to play and even from time to time getting the mom and aunties up and moving. I keep thinking, “there’s a new sheriff in town”!
Shows are starting to ramp up. Lots of paperwork to scan in today. That’ll teach me for taking time away from it last weekend. It probably wasn’t the weekend actually but the preparation for the weekend. I do say though, I love going the route of scanning the paperwork instead of lugging the files to the show. Although I will probably bring ARI certificates that have been mailed in when I drive to shows like MABA and VAOBA. I will give them back to the exhibitors so they can recycle them for future shows…
Well, guess I had better get on with this day… Until the next time!