2010 Shearing done

For the most part, anyway. We have a bit of trimming to do on Jerry and I want to smooth out Alice's shoulders, but I am now looking at washing two nice fleeces.

Here is Jerry before:

Jerry after:

Yeah, we need to shear about 998 more sheep to get good at this, but I do see progress from shearing I attempted on two other sheep in the last two years. Most importantly, Jerry survived and only got one small knick. I have few second cuts and basically skirted as we went along and didn't put the nasty stuff in the bag at all.

Jerry's staple mid-side is about 8 inches.
Alice's staple mid-side is about 6 inches.

Jerry is heavier with lanolin than Alice's. When we weighed them both today after shearing in preparation for giving them CDT shots in the next couple of weeks, we learned that Alice actually outweighs Jerry. She is plumper.

I don't know what to call this method other than team shearing... old farts shearing might be more like it. In any case, eventually, both men ended up sitting on the ground and holding Jerry fore and aft and Deb and I completed the haircut.

Clearly, it resulted in a very ugly haircut as Alice literally beat the buggers out of Jerry for about 90 minutes. She just kept butting him and knocking him down. I don't know if she really didn't know who he was and was scared or if she finally realized he was actually the smaller sheep and decided to put him in his place.