Scottish National fleece show de brief

After a busy three days up at the Border Mill for the Scottish National Fleece Show, a rather late night last night and Paul drinking rather a lot of wine, neither of us were too keen on getting up this morning.  It didn't help that it was drizzling and very misty again.

We had a very successful show, there were 152 fleeces from across the UK and we had entered 5 fleeces and came home with 5 rosettes.  Our judge, Rob Bettinson started with the greys and worked his way through to white, so our first fleece to be judged was our multi-champion Meketaten (sire Golden Guinea), she was awarded 1st junior brown with 75.5, a higher score than many good white fleeces, very impressive for a dark brown! Meketaten's full brother, Spadicious, is in our weaning field now and we have high hopes for him too!

We had four whites entered in three different classes, Casiphia was the first one out and scored an impressive 80.5 and was placed 2nd junior white from the biggest class of the show with 25 entries.  Casisphia is from our supreme champion Legend of Spartacus and is a very impressive young girl.
In the adult white class we had two entries, Lualeni and Tenzing from our 2008 and 2009 crias respectively.  I couldn't believe it when I saw the results, two rosettes!   Lualeni came 1st with a cracking 83.5 points and Tenzing was 5th on 79.5 points.  She scored 19.5 out of 20 for fineness and handle and Rob was very complimentary about Tenzing's fleece in particular his very impressive staple length.

Our final entry was Veruschka in the senior white class where she was placed 4th (74.5 points).  Veruschka is mum to Casiphia and Tenzing and this year she has had another white boy called Cazenova from one of our other elite studs, Gianmarco's Masterpiece so we will see what he does in the show ring next year.

Having looked at all the results we are obviously doing something right as we had 3 fleeces in the top 15 overall scores and all 5 of our fleeces scored over 74.  Rob Bettinson in his summing up of the show said that any fleeces scoring over 70 are excellent so you can imagine how pleased we are with our breeding programme.  Here is our haul of rosettes: