New Product + Preparing for your Fiber Harvest
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New Product Announcement:
Irish Cable Afghan
Our new Irish Cable Afghan is a beautiful addition to our product catalog.
The whole family including your pets will want to curl up with our new soft and cozy afghan. We used a Cable Knit stitch with a Celtic Irish knot pattern that you can view in detail in the closeup product image. The yarn and knit pattern were designed to provide superior warmth and hand without the bulkiness and excessive weight associated with natural fiber blankets. It's generously sized at 70" by 56" to be shared with a loved one on a frosty day spent inside.
Available @ Fiber and Wholesale pricing now!
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Preparing for your Fiber Harvest
With fresh snow falling weekly across the country it may be hard to fathom Spring is just around the corner and that means shearing season is fast approaching. As more farms' business models shift from strictly breeding and selling offspring to fiber processing and products it's vital as an industry that utmost importance and care are put into getting the very most usable fiber from each year's clip.
There are a handful of pitfalls we see everyday at NEAFP as fiber comes in for processing that we would like to share with you to help jump start your planning for this year's shearing.
The #1 reason for fiber being downgraded or flat out discarded is CONTAMINATION.
Contamination comes in several forms, but the big culprits are the following:
Vegetable Matter (VM) - Much otherwise beautiful fiber is lost each year due to being heavily contaminated with VM. The easiest way to prevent too much VM from working into your fiber harvest is proper care of your pastures, barn yards and shearing areas. By removing the common culprits from your alpaca's environment you can greatly reduce the amount of effort put in after shearing to skirt out this unwanted contamination. Clean pastures, tip shearing your cria, low to the ground feeders, debris free hay, and a clean shearing environment are crucial to losing otherwise processable fiber to VM contamination.
Guard Hair and Short Cuts - The skirting out of coarser guard hair, armpit/brisket fibers, and short cuts (under 1.5" in staple length) is vital to the overall quality of the finished products your fiber harvest will be going in to. By placing a freshly sheared blanket on a skirting table cut side down you'll be able to quickly see the halo of guard hair stand out and remove it by hand without also pulling up the softer blanket. By using a mesh skirting table you too will be able to shake out the short cuts under 1.5" in staple length.
 Mold, Mildew, and Moths - Fiber that is improperly stored and for long periods of time run the risk of being completed decimated by Moths, Mold, and Mildew. Fiber that's damp at the time of shearing should be laid out in a dry space to air dry before being packed up for processing. Mold will grow on damp fiber and eat away at the proteins, making it not have the proper tensile strength to be used in processing. Fiber that is hoarded for long periods of time, whether in your closet, barn, garage, or basement runs the risk of being eaten away by Moths. The number one way of combating these issues is getting your fiber out for processing as soon as humanly possible! The longer it sits, no matter what it's in or how many moth balls are placed around it, the chances of it being eaten by mold or moths are greatly increased.
 Cross Contamination - To prevent cross contamination between individual fleeces, we recommend that all animal's sheared fiber be kept in separate bags in the three basic grades as it comes off the animal. Each animal should produce three bags of fiber, their blanket, neck and upper leg, and their thirds. By keeping each component of the fiber separate, you prevent cross contamination between an individual animal's own fiber grades. We also recommend that you do not combine similar colored animals fiber into all one bag. By not combining same color blankets and neck fiber from different animals together you prevent fleeces with different characteristics contaminating with each other and bringing down the lot as a whole.
By taking care of these common pitfalls before, during, and after shearing you will greatly increase the amount of usable fiber your farm produces each year. You'll also save a tremendous amount of money in shipping and processing costs by not paying to ship fiber that will ultimately be unusable or heavily skirted on the processors end.
Before this upcoming shearing, we recommend everyone download and read our Fiber Harvesting Guide.
It covers all the most vital topics in getting the most out of your yearly fiber harvest including: Planning Scheduling and Communicating with your Shearers, Managing Workers and Volunteers, Preventing Contamination, Skirting, and Packaging up your harvested fleece for Processing!
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2014 Upcoming Fiber Collections
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MORE INFORMATION
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About NEAFP
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The New England Alpaca Fiber Pool is an alpaca fiber processing solution supporting alpaca farms and retailers all across the United States. We pride ourselves on exclusively manufacturing in the U.S.A. for over 17 years creating environmentally and socially conscious fashion out of U.S. grown alpaca fiber. Our solution provides alpaca farms with a method to maximize the value of their alpaca fiber and utilize commercial scale processing in the USA, all while still maintaining complete control over their business.
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