Shearing time is here at Shepherd’s Lamb and Tierra Wools! Lambing will begin in earnest soon and our mama ewes need to lose their winter coats before giving birth. Shearing a two-day affair for us - we have a lot of sheep! - and it takes many hands to get the wool off the sheep and into bales for storage and shipping.
Perhaps the trickiest part of shearing is picking out a spring day when the shearing crew can come that’s also dry and not too windy. Our shearing crew comes from southern Colorado and they are extremely busy at this time of year making the rounds in the area. When the crew arrives, we set up a chute into the shearing trailer and spread large tarps on one side of the trailer to catch the fleeces as they come off the sheep. On top of the tarps we set up three skirting tables to work the fleeces, and behind them station the baler - an amazing piece of equipment that really makes it easy to pack the fleeces into big bales (big as in 600+ lbs!) for storage and shipping. (In the “olden days” long burlap sacks were hung from a frame and someone would stand inside the bag and trample the fleeces down as they were thrown in!)
Here come the sheep! Into the corrals they go, where they are sorted and then sent into the chute for shearing. The white sheep go first so that we can keep the white wool white! Our Navajo-Churro sheep also come for shearing as a group so that we can carefully inspect each fleece and pick out the best ones to bag individually for raw wool (also called “in-the-grease”) hand-spinning.
The sheep chute runs the full length of the trailer, with a gate at each shearing station. When the shearer is ready, he opens his gate to take a sheep out and sits the sheep on its behind to remove the belly wool first. Then he shears around the body, working quickly but carefully to keep the fleece fibers as long as possible. (“Second cuts,” wool fibers that have been cut twice resulting in short lengths, aren’t any good for spinning into yarn so this is something the shearers always work carefully to avoid.) When the fleece has been completely removed, the sheep walks down a ramp to join its companions in the field and shearer pushes the fleece out onto the tarps where the skirting team takes over.
The skirting team throws the fleece onto the skirting tables and shakes the fleece to allow any second cuts to fall away. They then work over the entire fleece, pulling off any pieces that are excessively soiled or full of burrs - things that would make the wool difficult to wash before spinning. Finally, they put the cleaned fleeces into the baler to be packed for storage until they’re ready to go off to the mill for spinning.
All done!
