Thank you!

We'd like to thank all of the visitors to our booth at Black Sheep Gathering this past weekend. We had a lot of fun - the Gathering is always a treat for us. We'll be there again next year!

In the meantime, if you find yourself in need of a little alpaca, please visit our online store, The ALPACA Merchant. If we don't have what you're looking for (our fleeces aren't up on the store, yet), drop us a line and let us know what you need. If we don't have it or can't make it, we'll find it for you!

And for those of you who purchased alpaca from us, remember to send us your pictures of your finished items! We'd love to see what you've done!

Kim & Pam Upper
Upper Alpacas

Black Sheep Gathering Report -- we're tired.

Black Sheep Gathering is over for 2005. It was fun and I wanted it to last longer, but I'm not sure I would have lasted another day. I am tired. Very tired.

Purchases were disciplined. We came home with less fiber than we took. Pam bought a needle felting kit and made a cute little bear. I bought some spinning wheel oil.

The cria is doing well. I wish I had hours to write about her.

This week's goal -- recovery from BSG.

Twice Makes Tradition

Black Sheep Gathering is turning into a five day event for us. For the second year in a row, Georgia delivered her cria on Wednesday prior to BSG, completely destroying our plans for Thursday setup, but freeing us both up to attend the event over the weekend.

Last year, it was Donovan, a spitting image of his mother.

This year, it is Georgina -- Georgia's long-awaited first daughter. Georgina is bright white with pink nose and toes. She weighed in at a hefty 20.8 pounds -- tall and straight. Her fiber appears to be very crimpy and fine, but we'll have to wait a while to see for sure. Best of all, she's alert, healthy, and active. Healthy cria are always a relief!

Like last year, we thought Georgia was going into labor on Tuesday evening. We checked her regularly all evening, and awakened at every minor noise all night. Camelids have some ability to arrest the progression of labor, and just like last year, Georgia chose to wait until Wednesday to deliver her baby.

We're off to BSG set-up this afternoon. If we seem rather tired, it's because we've already had a big week.

Black Sheep Gathering -- an Invitation

If you are attending Black Sheep Gathering this weekend, we invite you to stop by our booth to say hello and look at our alpaca fiber. Our booth is located in building one of the trade show area, near the second door to building two. If you enter the show through the main entrance into building two, keep left as you enter and turn left at the second door. If, as many do, you enter the show through the large garage door at the end of building one, we're at the far end of the building by the doors into the rest of the show.

The fiber is (almost) all packed. The booth furniture is (mostly) gathered. The big question at this point is, will Georgia's cria arrive in time for both of us to attend the show or will Pam be stuck home on cria watch while I run the booth?

Half a Stash

I've been busy skirting and sorting more fiber for Black Sheep Gathering. I'd say I've had no time for fiber, but that's not quite true. When one is skirting under duress pressure, and doesn't have time for the fun things like carding and spinning, it only seems like one has no time for fiber.

I thought I'd show some pictures of my stash.


This stack is all blanket fleece -- mostly prime fleeces -- from other people's alpacas. There are a couple nice gray fleeces in the stash to be over-dyed and a couple nice light fleeces for ordinary dyeing, plus lots of other colors for natural colored yarn. Unfortunately, these fleeces are yet to be skirted -- and it's not likely I'll have them ready for BSG.

Yes, this stack of fiber is in the living room.

And that's less than half my stash.


This is my stash of fleeces ready for BSG. These are all skirted, weighed and ready to be packaged and labeled. In this case picture, the fleeces have been compressed and stuffed into storage cubes. There are a lot of fleeces in this picture!

And yes, this stack of fiber is also in the living room.

The skirting board is piled high -- also in the living room -- with fleeces that I think are ready for BSG or can be skirted in time for BSG. The guest bed is stacked with fleeces about which I need to make decisions. Do I take these fleeces for sale at BSG, or do I keep them for myself? Do I enter them in fleece shows or in alpaca spin-off competitions?

We do have a designated fiber storage hobby room in this house. It's stacked so full of alpaca fiber we don't have space for any hobbies.

Vegetable Matter

Ah, the age-old question about vegetable matter in fleece -- be it alpaca, wool, or something else.

I was once asked, "Why don't you remove all the vegetable matter from your fleeces?" The venue was a fiber show and as the discussion continued, it became clear that the question wasn't just about some hay in one of my fleeces, but the amount of vegetable matter in most of the fleeces at the show. The individual asking the question was almost distressed about the level of contaminants in natural fiber.

I probably didn't handle the question well. It's a hard question to handle well. The truth is that alpacas -- at least our alpacas -- live in the real world that includes hay, grass, burrs, manure, and all the usual accoutrements of pasture life. We keep our alpacas on pasture with three-sided sheds for shelter. They graze in the rain if they feel like it. While we are making efforts to remove them, we have burrs in our pasture. Our alpacas roll in the burrs if they feel like it.

Reality is that natural fiber grown in normal agricultural conditions will have vegetable matter contaminants.

I am aware of one and possibly two methods for removing all vegetable matter from animal protein fibers such as wool and alpaca. One involves harsh chemical treatments and is probably not available in the United States. I've heard hints, but can find no concrete information about the second. Beyond these two methods, there are a variety of small commercial machines purported to reduce the amount of vegetable matter in a fleece

Cooking the fleece in Sulfuric Acid
There is a method of removing vegetable matter from wool that involves heating the wool in sulfuric acid under controlled temperature conditions. Under the right conditions, sulfuric acid reacts more quickly with cellulose than it does with protein. Since cellulose is the main component of most plant materials, vegetable matter can be chemically reduced to ash without too much damage to most of the wool. Essentially, the vegetable matter is converted to guncotton and then burned to ash while the slower-reacting and fire-resistant wool remains.

Chemists in the audience might, however, speculate about what happens to keratin when cysteine is exposed to sulfuric acid and heat.

Hand-processing advocates will tell you -- and I don't know if it is true -- that more people are allergic to chemicals created or left behind by harsh chemical processing of wool than are actually allergic to wool.

Wool processed using this method generally feels harsher and more brittle to me than wool cleaned by other means. I don't really want to apply this process to my alpaca fiber.

At any rate, I don't have the facilities in my kitchen to cook alpaca fiber in hot sulfuric acid. My understanding is that there are no longer any commercial facilities anywhere in the United States capable of processing fiber using this method. I don't particularly want to subject my alpaca fiber to this method, but I would have to send my alpaca fiber out of the country for processing if I wanted to.

Crushing vegetable matter to dust
I have heard references to a process where wool is dried until vegetable matter becomes brittle and then crushed so that the vegetable matter is crushed to dust. Unfortunately, I can find nothing more than hints that the process exists. I cannot find any description of how the process works, nor can I find any reference to a mill or processor actually using the technology.

Crushing makes sense for reducing burrs and seeds to dust. I think it might help break up straw to the point it falls out more easily during carding. I don't see crushing helping much to remove high-quality hay unless the process is aggressive enough that it starts to damage the fiber. Still, I'd love to try the crushing process on some of my fleeces to see what happens.

If anyone has any information about a facility that can apply this technology, I'd love to hear about it.

Other Methods
Small commercial machines to shake vegetable matter and other contaminants out of fiber do exist. They don't remove all vegetable matter, just some of it. Commercial drum carders remove some vegetable matter -- depending on the nature of the fleece and the contaminant -- from the fleece, but again they don't remove everything.

In my processing, I skirt my fleeces to the limit of my patience. I comb and clip a lot of tips. Sometimes I put the fleece aside and come back to it when I have more patience. In my early days of hand-processing fiber, I got a number of thistle stickers in my fingers -- drawing blood -- while spinning a fleece I had prepared. Worse, I was sitting in a spinning circle trying to sell fiber when it happened. The memory of those slivers motivates me when I skirt my fleeces.

I keep tweezers handy when I'm carding and I remove a lot of vegetable matter from the fleece during carding. Even more falls out on it's own as evidenced by the pile of vegetable matter and sand that accumulates under the drum carder.

I stop and pick vegetable matter from the yarn while I'm spinning. Other debris falls from the yarn during the drafting process. Dust and small pieces of vegetable matter collects on my lap during spinning. Ideally, fleeces are clean enough that I don't stop often while spinning, but no roving is perfect.

I read blogs where knitters are commenting (complaining?) about vegetable matter in fancy, high-end knitting yarns. I talk with small commercial processors who have vegetable matter in their product. I'm not the only one who has problems with vegetable matter.

I've come to the conclusion that I can't remove all vegetable matter. I have to live with some vegetable matter in the fiber I process. I try to remove as much as I can as early in the process as possible. At some point, however, removing the additional vegetable matter is not worth the effort -- and in some cases doing so creates more problems than it solves.

Next time you encounter vegetable matter as you're spinning or knitting, just remember, a little vegetable matter is the price of a soft yarn. And, if you encounter excessive vegetable matter in something I sold, please do let me know.

More Skirting -- With Pictures this time

I've been doing more skirting, and I actually got the camera out for a bit. Skirting gets tedious, so I'll do anything -- including writing about skirting -- to avoid the process after a while.



Above is Sindre's fleece as it comes out of the bag after shearing. This happens to be half of Sindre's prime blanket (back and sides / first quality) fleece for 2005. The fiber was put into the bag slightly damp and allowed to dry in the bag which is why it has taken on the shape of the bag. Note the varying gray color of the fleece. Those odd light spots and streaks are hay and other vegetable matter.




If one is skillful, the above lump of fiber can be unrolled so it looks something like this. The fleece is unrolled to a single layer with the cut ends -- the end that was next to the alpaca's skin -- facing down on the skirting board. The tips -- the end that gets exposed to the elements when the fiber is on the animal -- are up. With the fleece in this position, one can begin to skirt out (remove) the vegetable matter from the fleece. The darker fiber in the lower left of the photo comes from Sindre's lower sides which are darker than his back. I can also tell from the location of the lighter spot that this fiber is from Sindre's right side and the fiber from his front is toward the right in this picture.

For clean fleeces -- and this one is NOT a clean fleece, the bits and pieces of vegetable matter can be picked out in fifteen minutes to an hour.




Of course, if you have a fine-fibered alpaca who loves to tip his hay bin over and roll in the hay, some of his fleece looks like this. This is from the area where the base of the neck joins the front of the back. Hay tends to collect in this region and I believe the technical term is "rat's nest". I may well end up throwing this handful away.




More hay -- if only it all were so easy to remove as this little piece.




And that would be a burr.




When the tips have been thoroughly cleaned up, the fleece gets turned over. This is what the cut ends look like. Some vegetable matter gets removed from this side. Most of what gets removed from this side of the fleece is second cuts -- short pieces where the shearer has gone over the fleece twice and cut the fiber in two places. Second cuts can cause problems in processing and slubs in spinning, so they get removed. In the past, I've thrown out all my second cuts. This year, I plan to experiment with felting our second cuts and I may make some available as "felting fluff".

I actually turned Sindre's fleece over for the picture long before I removed all the debris from the tips. Cleaning Sindre's fleece will take two to four hours and involve combing the vegetable matter from the tip of every lock. I use a metal dog comb which has no flashing to catch the fiber to comb the debris from the tips. A few of Sindre's tips are actually felted with the vegetable matter felted into the fiber. I'll clip these with a pair of scissors. When I tip-comb a fleece, I actually pull it apart lock by lock, so it doesn't turn over nicely as in the pictures above.

One of the problems with alpacas is that fine-fibered alpacas tend to retain vegetable matter in their fiber more than their coarser herdmates. The finer the fiber, the more debris gets retained. One of my struggles as a breeder is to figure out -- and implement -- the husbandry techniques to minimize tip felting on fine alpacas. It's a real challenge.




The finished product looks something like this -- except I cheated. This fiber is Sindre's 2004 seconds (neck and upper legs -- in Sindre's case, still good stuff) which has been tip-combed and is ready to be carded and spun. I'll have this fleece available for purchase at Black Sheep Gathering and if it doesn't sell there, I'll make it available on our website after the event.

As for Sindre's 2005 prime blanket as seen in the pictures above, it's still full of hay and I don't know what I'm going to do with it. I might offer it discounted at BSG as an unskirted project fleece or I might hold onto it and comb it out sometime when I'm not quite so busy. Either way, the wonderful softness of this fleece will eventually reward the patience necessary to comb the hay from the fiber.

Skirting

... and skirting and skirting and ...

What do you do with alpaca fiber after shearing?

You skirt it.

Skirting fiber means taking out all the undesirable material from the fiber. Usually skirting means removing all the vegetable matter, dung tags, and non-fiber elements, plus any undesired fiber. In the case of alpaca, there are two types of skirting -- skirting for show and skirting for fiber processing. In general, skirting for show is more work.

When skirting for fiber processing, the objective is to remove everything that won't work well in processing and everything you don't want in the final yarn. It's easy -- if you don't want to wear it, take it out. This includes guard hairs at the edge of the fleece, short fiber, second cuts that won't process well or will cause bumps in the yarn -- that is unless you want bumps in the yarn. Vegetable matter -- mostly hay, straw, and burrs -- is also removed.

Skirting for show adds several dimensions to the skirting. First, uniformity -- of texture and color -- is a big deal in showing alpaca fiber. At the same time, points are awarded for fleece weight. Any fiber removed in skirting reduces the fleece weight, so removing fiber is only beneficial if removing the weight adds points in some other aspect of the fleece score. The other major complication in skirting for show is that it's generally preferable to leave the fleece intact. When skirting for fiber processing, you know the next step is sending the fleece through a picker or carder, so fleece integrity isn't a major factor. At a fleece show, the judge will lay out the entire fleece to look at it, so fleece integrity is a big deal.

I frequently clip felted tips and comb out matted tips when skirting fleeces. This isn't allowed in skirting for show. In general, skirting for show is more work than skirting for processing and a show-skirted fleece is usually ready for fiber processing. While skirting Ipo's fleece, I discovered this isn't always the case. Ipo has a lot of stuck tips -- probably mudded together rather than felted -- that contain vegetable matter. Under show rules -- no combing -- it is very hard to open these tips to release the vegetable matter. The best I can do is leave the tops as is and lose points for them rather than risk disqualification for combing. If I were skirting this same fleece for processing, I would clip a few and comb many of these tips to remove the vegetable matter.

I don't know if we are going to show any fleeces or not. We have, however, several that we are thinking about showing. Therefore, I have been trying to treat each fleece as a show fleece to practice skirting for show. I've been more successful with some fleeces than with others. I ended up doing my usual "stir-and-paw" skirting method on Jubilee's blanket, for example.

I wish I had tried show-skirting earlier. I've learned something by doing so, and I think I have learned ways to skirt fleeces faster and more thoroughly. One of the tricks in show skirting is to lay out the whole -- or half -- blanket on the skirting board and to pick all the debris and second cuts off one side of the fleece. Then the fleece is turned over and the process repeated for the other side. While I'm still having a great deal of difficulty turning fleeces over, I find this method doesn't incorporate the vegetable matter nearly as badly as some of my pawing does. Of course, on those fleeces where the vegetable matter is already well-integrated into the tip of every lock, it's a moot point.

At any rate, I have learned something by trying to skirt fleeces for show, and I think it will result in faster skirting of fleeces for fiber processing. Faster skirting probably translates to better skirting because the amount of debris removed from a fleece often depends as much on my patience as the amount of debris present. I'm hoping my customers will notice -- and appreciate -- the improvement in the fleeces I sell and I'm really hoping I'll notice a difference in the fiber I spin. I'm learning, and we shall see.

More on skirting when I get around to it. Maybe I'll even include some pictures. In the meantime, I've got several more fleeces to skirt.