Introductions

Hello, and welcome. My name is Kim Upper, but don't let my given name fool you. I'm a guy. Always have been. Always will be. Now, if I only had a nickel for every piece of junk mail addressed to Ms. Kim Upper ... As if my name weren't enough to confuse everybody, I'm the spinner in the house.

My wife Pam who writes the alpacatalk blog and I operate Upper Alpacas. We're a small alpaca breeding operation and we have an associated fiber business that I'm trying to grow. We both take care of the alpacas, but somehow I seem to do all the manure management. I do the fiber processing. Pam does most of the sales, marketing, and website work.

I started spinning in early 2002 when we first decided to buy alpacas. I said, "If we're going to have those very expensive fiber animals on the place, I want to know how to use the fiber." So, I learned to spin and it is something I really enjoy doing. Oh, I get tired of spinning on occasion -- usually in the middle of a big custom job with a deadline -- but generally I love spinning.

I work mostly with natural colored alpaca fiber, although I have played around with kool-aid and food coloring dyes. Our herd is mostly dark alpacas, so I have excellent natural colors to work with and not a lot of fiber light enough to dye. This suits my interests just fine, because I love working with natural colors of natural fiber. One of my specialties is to blend different natural colors of alpaca to produce yarns and rovings with varied effects. I have discovered that if I blend two colors almost to uniformity on my drum carder, I can produce very striking yarn from that roving. It sounds easy, but it took me a while to figure out the tricks to getting it just right.

In this blog, I'm going to talk about alpacas, fiber, spinning, and I'm going to generally try very hard to keep my readers posted about what's on my skirting board, what's on my spinning wheel, and what I'm knitting or crocheting.

Kim