The Princess Breaks a Nail!

The only significant news in today's cria watch is that Chloe broke a toe nail.

Actually, we're glad it broke -- now we don't have to trim it.

General practice in the alpaca industry is to avoid stressing pregnant females in the last sixty days of pregnancy. This is because stress tends to induce labor and premature labor is not a good thing. Chloe is well into this sixty-day no-stress period and we've been debating trimming her toenails. The discussion centers on the stress caused to Chloe by trimming her nails versus the stress caused by walking around the pasture with untrimmed nails. We don't want to stress Chloe and the long nails aren't really causing her much problem in our soft, wet pastures. We'll leave Chloe's nails until after delivery unless there are real problems.

Today's broken nail was not a problem.

I've been told that alpacas in their native habitat don't need nail trimmings because the ground is rocky and the nails wear down. In our experience, long alpaca toe nails tend to break off just beyond the quick. We've seen the same pattern enough times to think it's a natural process and I'm beginning to doubt the rocky ground theory in favor of my nail-breaking theory.

Hard to imagine a day when the Princess breaks a nail and everybody cheers.

ETSY, Webrings, and Cria Watch

ETSY
I've held off marketing my alpaca fiber and handspun alpaca on eBay because I see that as selling a luxury product in a discount marketplace. I believe that if alpaca is to be marketed as the luxury fiber it is, it shouldn't be sold as a discount commodity in a forum like eBay. I know other alpaca breeders, having not a clue what to do with it, do dump their fiber on eBay, thereby setting the tone and the price. I suppose my luxury fiber high ground becomes sort of a moral tilting at windmills because of these other breeders. It's all a big, long, philosophical and marketing topic, but what I'm really leading to is ETSY.

Many of my readers are selling on ETSY and I'm interested in your experience and reaction. Is ETSY just another discount marketplace or is it a place where crafters really can get something -- if not full value -- for their skill and time? What has your experience been? What is your advice regarding selling or not selling on ETSY?

Those of you who have visited The Alpaca Marketplace, our on-line store, will notice the catalog function is, to be honest, rudimentary. (The inventory isn't updated very often either, but that's mostly a different issue.) I'd like to update the store a bit, and I don’t particularly feel like taking the time and effort to customize osCommerce or anything similar. I'm considering ETSY as an option and I would like to know if ETSY is a good option.

Webrings
Many of my readers are also members of the Handspun Luxury Yarn webring. This webring is giving us fits. We're getting weekly (or more frequent) messages telling us our code is wrong, yet our code looks right to our eyes and when we run the webring code checker on our page, it says our page is right. It's all rather frustrating. I've also noticed that the amount of traffic we're seeing from the webring and webring-associated sites is down considerably. I'm almost to the point of dropping the ring completely. Is anybody else having any problems with the ring?

Cria Watch
Chloe's due date is May 10, 2006. Alpaca gestation is 345 days, plus or minus thirty days. This means official cria watch begins April 10th. Unofficial cria watch is already starting ...

Supposedly, alpaca babies tend toward the summer solstice slightly from the due date. This means spring babies tend to be slightly late while fall babies tend to be slightly early. Tend, of course, is no guarantee. Therefore, Alpaca breeders tend to plan their days around the mere possibility of a cria's arrival for six to eight weeks before the actual event.

To balance the inconvenience of uncertain gestation periods, alpacas have the very nice habit of delivering babies during daytime hours -- generally between 9:00 AM and 2:00 PM. (Horse breeders take note.)

We're on cria watch. We can't do lunch, but what about supper?

Wiry Texture in Alpaca Fiber

June, Cathy, and I have been having this ongoing discussion about alpaca and crochet. We've been using terms like "hard" yarn. Now the term wiry has entered the conversation.

I have felt wiry alpaca in several circumstances. Mostly, I think the texture I describe as wiry enters the discussion when high-micron or coarser fiber is used. This fiber sometimes feels wiry right off the alpaca and often doesn't get any better with processing.

I have a theory -- and only a theory -- about another way in which the wiry texture gets introduced. My theory is that the wiry feeling gets introduced is when a batt or roving has variable-length fibers with some fibers longer than others -- as when a bit of chest (apron) hair has been carded into a prime blanket fleece. The longer, coarser, hair wraps around the softer fluffy stuff in the spinning process, giving the exterior or the yarn a wiry texture even though the average fleece is nice and soft. To my hands, texture (softness) is weighted toward the coarsest fibers in the fleece. When I combine two fleeces of different diameter, the resulting blend generally feels coarser than the average of the two fleeces to me.

My theory above isn't the whole story. I have had great success softening some not-very-soft, very-long staple suri by blending it with 30-50% huacaya. The resulting yarns and rovings feel softer than the average of the two fibers. In fact, one particular huacaya-suri blend using this batch of suri feels softer than either of the parent rovings. I think some of the softening is because the huacaya adds loft, but I don't think loft is the whole story, either. Something else is happening and I can't explain it yet.

When I'm spinning singles for a two-ply yarn, the singles often feel "hard" or "wiry" because they are slightly overspun. Softness is restored when I ply the yarn because the plying turns the yarn the opposite direction and relaxes some of the twist.

I've been thinking about the hardness I experience in the base of my crochet stitches. I've been attributing this to layers of yarn in the stitch and a bit of tightness in the way the yarn wraps around the stitch. Now, I'm wondering if the stitch doesn't cause some twist as well. If the crochet stitch is, indeed, causing some twist to the yarn, the yarn could be going back into overtwist status and the hardness could be from the twist in the yarn rather than from the topology of the stitch. In this case, I should be able to reduce the hardness I feel in my crochet garments by putting less twist into my singles. I'm going to experiment with this at some point in the future -- just as soon as I finish this black suri fleece I'm working on.

Disparate Quick Notes

Ipo's boot is off and her foot looks fine. She was supposed to wear the boot another week or so, but the boot came off on it's own. Other than missing fiber on her foot and ankle where she's had boot and bandage for two months, Ipo seems fine. We've seen no limping or indications of problems and Ipo seems happy to finally be free of the boot.

We've been allowing the girls to briefly graze the corridor between our fences every day at feeding time. They need forage and the grass needs mowing. It's easier to let them out for an hour than to mow. When I let the herd into the new grass on Saturday, Ipo went running and pronking up and down the corridor. With each mad running dash, the boot got looser and looser until she was pronking about with the boot flapping in the breeze and only the last velcro around her foot. We removed the boot to prevent injury.

The latest issue (Spring 2006) issue of Alpacas Magazine has some interesting scanning electron micrographs of various fibers. I found the differences in the shape and height of the scales very interesting. I've always heard that part of the reason wool is scratchier than alpaca fiber is that wool has higher scales. The differences in scale height are very obvious in the micrographs and the best wool has scales almost ten times the height of good huacaya. The article also talks about suri scales. It's worth a read -- or at least a look at the photographs.

I actually got some spinning done yesterday. I finished filling the second bobbin of black suri singles and then filled a bobbin of two-ply. Now I'm back to making more singles. Fine singles are slow work, and right now, it feels like the fleece is growing on me. It's beautiful yarn and glossy unwashed. I can't wait to see how it looks once it's washed and skeined -- I keep dreaming up projects even though the yarn isn't mine.

Knitting vs Crochet: It seems I started a controversy.

It all started with this post on June's Two Sheep blog. June observes that crochet stitches tend to turn any yarn into a three-ply version of itself and make bullet-proof fabric capable of standing up on it's own. She goes on to comment about a bulky, high-density fabric with no drape, etc.

I posted a comment in agreement with June and suggesting that I didn't like what crochet did to my handspun alpaca yarns, so I was learning to knit. As usual, I didn't word my post carefully enough.

The e-mails flew!

When I posted those comments, I had no intention of starting a knitting versus crochet controversy! I still don't! I learned to crochet more than thirty years ago. I've been learning to knit for less than two years. Both techniques are capable of producing wonderful garments and fabrics. Both techniques have appropriate and inappropriate uses. The two techniques are different and they do different things to yarn when converting it into fabric.

It is my opinion that crochet in my hands is less suited to my handspun alpaca yarn than I think knitting will be if I ever get good at it. You may have a completely different experience with your crochet using your handspun yarn.

I do make and sell crochet items from my handspun alpaca and they are very nice items worth every penny I charge for them. I should also note that I've never spun anything as fine as cobweight, nor used a hook smaller than size B. Mostly I have worked with sport to bulky weight handspun using crochet hooks in the E-J size range. Most of my crochet items are scarves with a fairly open pattern and hats with a less open pattern.

I went through a phase when I was using M-P hooks on super-bulky alpaca yarn. (I own alpacas, so I can afford enough fiber to make super-bulky yarn.) Super-bulky on large hooks makes great hats. Alpaca is soft enough that a hat can be a little stiff without being uncomfortable. Hats don't require much fiber memory, so the weight isn't an issue. And, unlike sweaters, it's not a big problem if a hat is too warm.

As June pointed out, crochet creates a lot of areas in the fabric where three and even four layers of yarn are present. Many of these areas are essentially knots, where the yarn is not only overlapping, but closely bent around itsself and unable to move smoothly past adjacent threads. To a degree -- and only to a degree -- these knots can be remedied by using looser stitches, something I have been working on in my crochet. Wide open patterns with lots of chains and double-treble crochets also suffer less from knots than does tight fabric made from single and double crochets. (All crochet terms U.S. style.)

Contrast crochet with knitting where the most common overlap is two strands of yarn and the individual strands have greater freedom to move past each other. I'm not saying three-strand overlaps don't occur in knitting. I'm simply saying they're not nearly so predominant. I'm still at the garter stitch and stockinette stage of knitting and I'm not clear what happens with ribs and cables. I suspect more strands of yarn get overlapped in these techniques, but I believe the strands of yarn still have greater freedom to move past each other.

The freebie patterns posted next to the Lion Brand yarn displays at Michaels or Walmart sometimes offer knit and crochet patterns for the same garment. Frequently, the crochet pattern calls for more yarn than the knit version. I'll take this as supporting evidence that crochet puts more yarn into a garment than knitting.

One of the great advantages of alpaca is drape. This is especially true of suri alpaca, but flexibility of fabric is an important enhancement to the softness of huacaya fabric. In most cases, a knit garment will have better drape and greater flexibility than a similar crochet garment simply due to the structure of the fabric. In this sense, I think knitting takes better advantage of what alpaca has to offer and helps one make the most of the fiber.

Weight creates two additional issues with crochet alpaca. First, if you put a crochet garment flat, there are areas of one strand of yarn, areas of two strands, and concentrated areas of three and four strands. These "knots" concentrate the weight of the fabric making the weight distribution uneven across the garment, creating flexible and inflexible portions of the garment.

The second weight issue concerns fiber memory. Alpaca simply doesn't have the fiber memory of wool and it is quite possible to make handspun alpaca garments too heavy for the available fiber memory. Because crochet puts more yarn -- hence more weight -- into the same garment than knitting does, crochet is -- in some ways -- more prone to fiber memory issues.

Finally, I am beginning to suspect the thick and thin nature of crochet may make the thinner areas more vulnerable to fiber memory issues. Because this is only a suspicion in my mind, I welcome any input on this issue.

Another advantage of handspun alpaca is the ability to sink into the very soft fiber. This "sinking into a cloud" feel is one of the aspect of alpaca I absolutely love. The "knots" in crochet harden -- and I use the term harden as opposed to harshen -- the fabric. The fabric still has the non-scratchy feel of good alpaca, but it doesn't have the "sinking into a cloud" feel that much of my handspun alpaca yarn has. The ability to sink into handspun alpaca is lost to a degree when the yarn is crochet. The thick and thin or "bumpy" feel of crochet also detracts from the "sinking into a cloud" experience. Every technique I have used to make fabric from alpaca fiber -- knitting, crochet, felting, weaving -- hardens the fiber to some extent and reduces the "sink into a cloud" feeling. I experience less "hardening" when I knit than when I crochet. This is another reason I believe knitting is a better technique than crochet for displaying the advantages of handspun alpaca.

Alpaca works very well in lace weight and open pattern garments. Crochet can be a wonderful technique for lace and open patterns. It's possible to make wonderful crochet items using handspun alpaca. At the same time, it is my belief that knitting takes advantage of alpaca's strengths and, more important, DISPLAYS alpaca's strengths in ways crochet -- at least in my hands -- simply cannot. This is why I'm learning to knit.

Going forward, I expect I will continue to crochet. I expect I will continue to make and sell crochet items from my handspun alpaca. I expect to add hand-knit items to my sales inventory. My issue is that crochet in my hands produces some fabric characteristics I consider less than optimal. Some of these attributes are inherent in the physics of crochet. I believe knitting avoids some of those characteristics. I fully expect that as I become a better knitter, I will discover drawbacks of knitting and find I want to do things with my handspun alpaca that can only be accomplished through crochet. I'm not "anti-crochet". I simply want to do things with my handspun alpaca that I'm not accomplishing through crochet -- things I think I can accomplish through knitting. I believe both techniques have their place in a fiber artist's repertoire. Both are valuable tools. Both have appropriate and inappropriate applications.

I'm not dissing crochet!

Right now, though, I'm frustrated by bumpy fabric from gorgeous yarn and I want to learn to knit well enough to see if knitting is a solution to my frustration.


Added 4:25PM on 3/4/06
See also Catena Expressions for the crochet side of the story. Cat is working with lighter weight yarns than I am. I don't know what else she's doing differently. Obviously, however, she's doing something right.
End edits and additions.