Raise Alpacas or Spin their Fiber

One of the dilemmas of raising alpacas and being a spinner is that time spent on the husbandry side of the business takes away from the fiber side -- and vice versa.

I felt so sorry for our alpacas in their muddy pasture without any grass -- those big eyes can make one feel guilty pretty quickly -- that I went out after writing yesterday's blog, dug another hole, and set another post. Today, I started to dig the last hole for our new northeast pasture, but my shoulders just weren't willing. There was a time -- I was younger then -- when I could dig post holes all day and get up the next day and do it all over again. Oh, I'd have some sore muscles maybe and maybe I'd complain about them. You know you're getting old when sore joints become a reason -- rather than an excuse -- to avoid heavy labor. To atone for my failure to complete the last hole, I spent some time installing corner braces. I should have installed four or five in the time it took me to install two -- and replace the brace wire I broke in the process. Only one more hole to finish, two more posts to set, nine braces to install, and one gate to hang and our alpacas will have more pasture. Then I get to start all over enlarging the west pasture and when I'm finished with the west pasture, there are the three (or four) south pastures to build. You begin to understand what I mean when I say that fence sure cuts into my spinning time.

I managed to do some spinning last night and I'm sure I'll get a little more done this evening. I keep thinking I've got that first bobbin of Pinero's fiber just about finished, only to decide I need to put more yarn on it. I expect I'll manage to start the second bobbin this evening and to start plying tomorrow or the next day.

Kim

Spin or Build Fence?

Pinero's fiber is spinning up really well. It wants to spin slightly finer than I anticipated and I'm going with this lighter weight. This is yarn in search of a project, so weight isn't a major issue. I'm usually happier with the yarn if I go with what the fiber gives me instead of trying to force something from the yarn, so I'm just going to go with the lighter weight. I've got the first bobbin almost full which is really good progress. The fiber is spinning really easily even though I didn't wash it first. Only problem is my fingers are getting pretty black.

I was supposed to make progress on some pasture fence today, too. Actually, I did dig one fence post hole. I didn't set the post, though, because I'll need help getting it exactly eight feet from the other post -- and it has to be exactly eight feet or the gate won't fit. I really ought to make myself go out and dig another hole, but who wants to build fence when there's fiber to spin? (Actually, I hate building fence and I'll do just about anything to avoid it -- just ask Pam.)

On the Spinning Wheel: Pinero

No change in the other projects.

Natural Gray Alpaca Fiber

Gray in alpacas is a pattern rather than a color. The color is caused by roaning -- mixing unpigmented fibers with pigmented fibers -- on a colored background. Silver-gray alpacas are roaning against a black background. Rose-gray alpacas are roaning against a brown or fawn background.

Big fiber processors will tell you not to breed for gray in alpacas. They say that gray is a bad thing and they can make gray by mixing white fleeces and black fleeces. I know gray sheep cause problems for large fiber processors who want their white fiber to be perfectly white -- so they can dye it perfectly yellow or perfectly blue or perfectly whatever. I can understand them discouraging large wool operations from raising gray sheep because if you accidentally mix a gray sheep fleece with a white fleece, then your bale of white wool isn't perfectly white.

I'm not convinced about mixing black and white alpaca fiber to make grays equivalent to the natural grays. I've blended quite a bit of alpaca fiber, and I have yet to create a mixture of black and white fiber that looks like a natural gray. Mixtures of black and white look like mixtures of black and white to me. They just don't have the same tones as natural gray alpaca. When I look closely at natural gray alpaca fiber, I see a lot of black hairs and a lot of white hairs, but I also think I see a lot that are in between. I am beginning to believe that gray alpacas are not a mixture of pigmented and unpigmented -- black and white -- fibers as we have been told, but a mixture of pigmented, unpigmented, and partially pigmented -- black, white and gray -- fibers.

At any rate, I just love natural gray alpaca fiber. Every gray alpaca is different, and each gray fleece spins up to a different appearance. I'm a small-scale fiber processor -- small even by cottage industry standards. I can breed for gray and work with natural gray fiber all I want.

We have two gray alpacas in our herd. Chloe and her half-brother Sindre. Chloe's fleece is a very uniform gray. When carded, you hardly notice the differences between the colors of her fibers. When spun, however, this seemingly uniform roving produces a gray yarn with some heathery salt-and-pepper aspects. In fact, it was spinning Chloe's fiber that gave us the idea for our HeatherSelect(tm) blends (which I'll discuss in the future).

I think the lack of uniformity is what attracts me to gray fleeces. Yarn from gray fleeces always shows greater color variation than the roving it comes from. The finer the yarn is spun, the more apparent the salt-and-pepper pattern in the yarn.

On the knitting needles: Some cruddy walmart-acrylic practice yarn and a badly mangled practice piece.

On the spinning wheel: Pinero -- and it may have seemed like a clean fleece when I decided to spin it unwashed, but it's sure making my hands dirty.

On the crochet hooks: Nothing at the moment.

On the skirting board: Puppies in the wool room blend -- drying further and waiting for a dry day so I can finish carding.

On deck: Another blend from the dog disaster in the wool room. The base fiber is a silver gray huacaya alpaca fleece to which I will add black baby suri. Both batches of fiber have a lot of color contamination, but that shouldn't matter in the blend. The end result should be a roving that spins to a gray yarn with black streaks.

Kim

Today's Projects

My big project today was to card some fiber so I have something to spin. All my carded roving is neatly packaged for sales. Rather than undo a package to have something to spin, I decided to start carding because I've got too much fiber in the house, anyhow. (Unfortunately, most of the too much fiber is thirds, but that's a story for a different post.) I worked on two batches of fiber today. The first batch is a blend that I think I'm going to call, "Puppies in the Wool Room." The second batch is a show blanket from an alpaca named Pinero.

My "Puppies in the Wool Room" Blend starts with our friends Ron & Marilyn Oliveira of Alpacas of Shepherd's Pasture. They have a partially finished wool room -- actually an alpaca fiber storage room -- in one of their sheds. This fall, they also had two young puppies. One day, the puppies got accidentally locked in the wool room. They investigated, and as bored puppies will, they found something to play with. Plastic bags of alpaca fiber make wonderful puppy toys. A dog can rip the plastic, then drag the sack around with this wonderful stuffing falling out -- it's rather like chewing the feathers out of a pillow. Then, if you rummage around in the fiber enough, you can find dingleberries to chew on -- and you never find those in the feathers of a pillow.

Marilyn was heartbroken. All her carefully stored fiber was stirred together in a big mess. A gorgeous black baby suri fleece suffered some of the worst damage. The dogs didn't damage the fiber, but they stirred it everywhere and got so much white fiber in the black suri that there is no way to make a black garment from the fiber without having white fibers everywhere. As a black fleece, it's ruined. However, baby suri is still wonderful fiber. It's already partially blended with these other fibers and since I enjoy making multi-color 100% alpaca blends and since I have experimented with huacaya-suri blends, I offered to take the fleece to see what I could do with it. Marilyn and I sorted through the fiber. What could be salvaged and returned to it's original fleece was salvaged. The badly stirred portions were set aside to be come my "Puppies in the wool room" blend. This is going to be a calico blend on a white base. The predominant colors will be black, dark red-brown, medium fawn, and white. There will also be some natural gray in the blend. The black, dark brown, and some of the fawn are suri alpaca. The white, gray, and most of the fawn are huacaya alpaca. One of the big challenges in creating the roving is to blend the fiber types to the yarn has a fairly even texture while keeping the colors sufficiently separate to give the yarn good color variation. It's going to be an interesting roving and it ought to make an interesting yarn.

Unfortunately, I discovered some damp patches in the fiber, so I wasn't able to finish the blend.

The other fiber I carded today is from an alpaca named Pinero. This is prime blanket fleece from his 2003 shearing and it was shown in a number of alpaca fleece shows during the 2003/2004 season and won a number of ribbons. I'm spinning this fleece for Jan of Happy Valley Alpacas in payment for several fleeces she gave me last summer. I generally work with washed alpaca fiber -- particularly when I'm working with fiber I intend to sell as roving. I prefer to spin washed alpaca fiber because it generally feels better on my fingers. Alpacas don't have lanolin, however, so it is seldom necessary to wash alpaca fiber prior to spinning. Some alpaca fleeces work up much better if they are carded and spun unwashed. Pinero's fleece had some tips that were starting to felt. It's a relatively fine fleece with lots of crimp and some cross-fibering. Rather than risk additional felting by washing the fleece prior to carding, I decided to work the fiber unwashed. it was a good decision. Pinero's fleece worked up really well. I put it through the carder twice, but it was really close to being spinnable after the first pass. It's going to be a fun fleece to spin.

The only thing I don't like about carding in December is that I do my carding outside. Pam banished the drum carder from the house after about fifteen minutes of use -- not a bad decision considering the amount of dust it generates. I try to do my carding during the summer when I can count on dry weather -- and it isn't cold and windy. However, I always end up in December or January with some fiber I want to card, so I end up freezing my fingers whenever our Western Oregon winter rain lets up enough that I have a dry place to card outside.

On the knitting needles: Some cruddy walmart-acrylic practice yarn and a badly botched and mangled practice piece

On the spinning wheel: I'll start Pinero this evening

On the crochet hooks: Nothing at the moment. I finished a hat yesterday using yarn handspun from Georgia's fiber.

On the skirting board: Puppies in the wool room blend, partially carded and drying more so I can finish the blend.

On deck: Another blend from the dog disaster in the wool room. The base fiber is a siver gray huacaya alpaca fleece to which I will add black baby suri. Both batches of fiber have a lot of color contamination, but that shouldn't matter in the blend. The end result should be a roving that spins to a gray yarn with black streaks.

Kim

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