The Process

HOW YOU CAN HELP
Most importantly, clean your fleece as much as possible before shearing!  Use a blower or flicker to get as much debris out of the coat as possible immediately before shearing, and always shear on a clean tarp.  Skirt the fleece to remove any debris, second cuts, and inferior fleece before sending it to be processed.  This will reduce your costs for postage and the percentage of weight lost in processing. Please do not send fiber under 3" or over 7" long.

Please do not send Suri cria fleece, unless it is to be blended with other fiber.  Some Huacaya cria blankets can be processed, but most Suri cria fiber is too weak.  Please check all your fiber for tenderness (weakness).

THE PROCESS
All fiber is hand washed and dried, then goes through the picker to open the fleece to prepare for carding.  If you would like to blend any other fiber with your alpaca, it will be added at this point.  Please ask us if you would like any Angora rabbit or wool blended with your alpaca.  We have several colors available.  If you have any other fiber you would like to blend, please call us to discuss specifics.

Next, the fiber is carded and combed into a beautiful sliver for hand-spinning.  The roving is neatly bagged, ready to spin.

If spinning is not your thing, we can then process the roving into yarn or hand spin it – simply ask for details.

Our finished yarn is available in any style you want.  For best results, send us a sample of the size yarn you desire.  We can also make singles, 2-ply, 3-ply or 4-ply yarn.  Any and all special requests are welcome!

Here are the steps to get from raw fiber to beutiful yarn. You can click each image to view a larger image.

Tumbling

After weighing your incoming fiber, we tumble it.  The fiber is put into a screen drum and rolled for a few minutes to shake a lot of the loose dirt, short second cuts & debris out of the fiber.  This makes the fiber easier to wash and puts less dirt into our septic tank.

Washing

Although alpaca fiber does not contain lanolin, it is still very dirty with sweat & oils from the animal’s skin.  We wash the fiber in very hot water in a large sink by hand, as agitation will felt the fiber into an unusable mass. We use biodegradable detergents specifically made for scouring fiber. Unlike large, commercial mills, we do not use toxic chemicals to dissolve the vegetable matter (VM).

Drying

Picking

Once the fiber is completely dry, we feed it through the picker to open up the locks & ready the fiber for carding.  The fiber may be picked up to four times, depending on how well it fluffs up.  Suri is generally picked 3 to 4 times, huacaya once or twice.  We then correct the fiber to 20% moisture content and add spinning oils to improve the elasticity of the fiber and to help it hold together better.  The low scale height of alpaca hair that makes it so soft also makes it harder to spin than wool.

Carding

Once the clumps are removed in picking, and the fiber is at the correct moisture level, it is carded.  Carding is a fascinating process!  Not only does the card separate the fibers, it also drops out most of the VM and a lot of the coarse, straight guard hairs.  Most of the second cuts that made it this far are also dropped out.  The fiber then comes out in the form of a thin sheet, called a web.  This web is then wrapped around a drum to form batts or run thru a pair of rollers (called a diz) to form a loose tube, often called roving. We can also drop the web directly into a bag to return a beautiful cloud for handspinning or felting.

Drafting

Alpaca fiber does not form a nice, solid roving like sheep’s wool does.  We run all roving thru the pindrafter once, which combs and drafts the fibers into a nice, smooth stream.  For yarn, we draft the fiber three times if it is huacaya, four times if suri.  This means the fibers are very smoothly aligned, resulting in a lovely sliver to be spun into a semiworsted yarn.

Spinning

Spinning is a very involved process, combining precise mathematical calculations and a ‘feel’ for the qualities of each individual batch.  A fleece may vary greatly in staple length, fineness, strength and other qualities that affect ‘spinnability’, which may require adjustments to the thickness of the sliver & the amount of twist used.  The spinner is tuned to each batch individually. 

As the sliver is fed into the back rollers, it gets flattened out in the blue apron, and then is teased out by the fast-moving front rollers.  At the same time, the bobbins are spinning below, twisting the yarn as soon as it comes from the front roller. The spun fiber is then wound onto the bobbin as a ‘single’.

Plying

Most yarn and even thread is plied.  Plied yarns are several singles twisted together to form a thicker and stronger yarn.  We use the spinner for this step as well, reversing the twist direction and re-tuning the speed of the motors.

The most common misconception we come across is people who think that 2-ply is a size of yarn.  It is simply the number of singles in the yarn.  Both laceweight yarn and mop string can be 2-ply yarns.  We prefer a 3-ply yarn, as it is a rounder, fuller shape than the DNA-like helix of a 2-ply.  We also prefer to use several plies to make a bulky weight yarn, to avoid the appearance of mop string & to increase strength.

Skeining or Cone Winding

After plying, we wind the yarn off the bobbins into skeins.  Skein size is completely up to the customer.  We default to a 300 yard skein as it is a nice manageable size for all but the bulkiest yarns. If you prefer, we can wind the yarn onto cones for ease of use in knitting or weaving.

Yarn Washing

Although we try to get the fiber as clean as possible during washing, it is never perfect.  As the fiber processes through the mill, it picks up more dust.  We wash the finished skeins again, to remove the dirt, spinning oils, and to set the twist & finish the yarn.  I balls are desired, we then wind the skeins into center-pull balls for ease of use.  The yarn is then returned ready to use or to sell!