Cleo is hands down one of the most stiking cria born at our ranch! She has a gorgeous head and well proportioned body. And her fiber is a yummy bright cinnamon color, very dense and crimpy with good fineness and uniformity.
We have tried showing her but she becomes so stressed that the judges can't get a good look at her. Too bad, because her pedigree is stellar! With Snowmass Royal Promise and Miss Mayflower as parents, we'll happily put her to work in our foundation herd. Her 2012 EPDs are very good: AFD -1.01, SD-0.007,.SF -0.94,%>30 -3.869. She offers the ability to produce cria with excellent fineness, density, uniformity and staple length resulting in heavy fleece weight.
For her first cria, we've bred Cleo to our light silver grey herdsire, CMN Amego. He boasts a bright, very dense fleece with bold crimp. And with his excellent conformation, we expected an amazing cria! And viola, we got a beautiful true black boy!
Cleo's second (2015) cria is out of Snowmass Velvet Legend. Both parents boast amazing density, crimp and style. Add Legend's fineness and we expected a very fine, dense and well conformed cria. What we got was a very pretty brown girl with black points and lots of potential. Unfortunately we lost her at about 2 weeks.
We then rebred Cleo to Silver Samovar by Vantaggio, our fantastic silver gray Reserve Color Champion male. Sammo's fleece is very fine and dense, exhibiting nice bundling and brightness. This pairing produced a gorgeous medium fawn girl. Rhiannon is a bit of a fleece monster with tons of bright peachy fleece that is very soft, dense and crimpy!
For her 2017 cria, we bred cleo to a sire we recently sold, Legend Hazit (Duke). Our hope was that his multi-generational gray background would take advantage of her ability to produce black and possibly give us gray. Boy did they come through with a beautiful silver gray girl! Queen Nefertiti is a serious fleece monster with amazing staple length, density and character.
After seeing what Cleo can do with gray, we decided to breed her to Vantaggio, Samovar's sire. Our hope is that, with less black in Vantaggio's pedigree, the gray will come through. We can't wait to birth this cria!