Hellchick

Two Saturdays ago I finally realized my long-time goal of becoming some kind of crazy fiber baron, someone who controlled the entire means of fiber production from the top down in my clenched, capitalist fist: I got my own alpacas.

There are three of them -- Cinnamon, Benz, and Silverton -- and they are completely adorable as alpacas are wont to be. Those of you who've been following our progress on Facebook already know their origin story, so you can feel free to skip a bit. But for those that don't, we got them from Don and Jody Stanwyck of Jo's Fleece Fields, who've gone above and beyond the call of duty in helping us prepare to be first-time alpaca owners. I'd read and researched for years but the time had finally come to actually get alpacas, because the only way I was going to learn any more was by actually owning them.

The first question I usually get is, "why would you own alpacas?" I own them because I've been a handspinner for a few years now, making my own yarn out of what used to be fiber that was bought and prepared by someone else. Occasionally I'd bought a fleece from someone that needed washing and preparing, but that had been the closest to the beginning of the chain that I'd ever come.

With my own alpacas I'll have a constant source of fiber to spin. Sure, there's effort and cost in raising them, but they're surprisingly easy to take care of and there are lots of other benefits, such as the fact that they're exceptionally goofy looking and adorable and we have a good laugh every time we see them. The amount of money I'd spend in yarn would probably equal their cost of care anyway. And my plan is to eventually sell the yarn I make from them that I don't use -- there will come a day far in the future when I no longer want to work in the games industry and would rather do something like a cottage industry where I make and sell my own handspun yarn.

We started with three knowing that our pasture (which totals about three quarters of an acre) could easily support that without hay supplement (except in the non-growing season), and expect to be able to comfortably expand up to five, but we're taking this year to see how fast three alpacas can munch down the existing grass before we do that. We looked at various farms before buying and bought these three boys because they seemed like the perfect fit for my criteria: they're highly socialized and easy to handle (two of them are 4-H animals and have had myriad kids handling them over time), have lived together on the same farm for a while so they're already companions, and their fleeces have great handspinning qualities. It was a great bonus that one of them, Cinnamon, has mostly white fleece, making it perfect for dying.

Once the boys were settled in I decided that with the time off I currently have I'd start a project that I'd document with photos in which I take one of the boys' fleeces and show everything about taking it from raw fleece to a knitted item from start to finish. I decided to go with Silverton's first -- his beautiful gray and silver fleece was begging to be spun up.

The fleece seemed surprisingly clean. While there's definitely some dirt that comes out during preparation it's nothing like some of the fleeces I've worked with before that were so matted with dirt and VM (vegetative matter) in parts that it was hard work to deal with.

I decided at the start that the knitted item I'd make with it would be some kind of shawl. I wanted to make this 100% alpaca so that it would be an all-Silverton preparation in the end, and 100% alpaca doesn't have the memory that a wool or wool blend would have. This means I need to knit something that can have a little stretch in it and not stretch out of shape, so a sweater wasn't the best idea. A folk-style shawl knitted in roughly a sport or fingering weight yarn seems like the perfect idea.

Looking at the fleece made me initially decide to try flick-carding it. Flick-carding is a preparation technique in which you simply take the locks out and, holding them by their butt ends (the end cut by the shearer), you flick the lock ends with either a special comb or a dog brush (a dog brush is essentially the same thing) to open them up. You then flip the locks around and do the same with the butt ends. From here you can either spin them like that or pull it into a roving. I didn't actually think to do this last part, so I flick-carded a bunch of locks and set them aside for spinning.

The next step was deciding if I wanted to spin on a drop spindle or my wheel. I have a Louet S10 spinning wheel, and it's been a great wheel over the years. But as I've been able to refine my technique I've found that it's less suitable for finer yarns, which are the yarns I've been spinning more of. It's single treadle, Irish tension, and has few ratios, which means the take-up is very strong and you have to treadle like mad to get any reasonable speed. Any spinning I've done in the last year has mainly been on a drop spindle and I tend to reserve the Louet for plying, which it's really perfect for. I do plan to upgrade to another wheel (keeping the Louet for plying) but until then, it's a drop spindle mostly for me.

So I picked up my favorite spindle and spun up a test skein from the flick-carded locks. The resulting skein was very cloudy and fluffy, far cloudier than I thought it would be. I'm pretty sure that flick-carding locks should result in a semi-worsted preparation because the fibers are all aligned, but this skein was far more like a woolen preparation. Which wasn't bad, mind you, just not quite what I expected.

So I decided that since I'd recently sprung for a swanky new set of St. Blaise wool combs that I would try making some combed top from the fleece and spin a worsted skein to test against the flick-carded skein and see which I liked better. I'm really loving the preparation I'm getting from my combs -- I'll be hard-pressed to want to hand-card anything again unless I specifically want a woolen yarn -- but I also know that there's more waste when you make combed top. But given the size of the bag of fleece -- and the fact that the fleece producer is out in my pasture eating grass to make more fleece for next year -- I'm less worried about waste than if I'd just bought a small amount of rare fiber. So, combs away!

Again, I spun up a test single, used an Andean bracelet to ply it back on itself since it was a small amount, and washed the skein. When I compared it to the skein from the flick-carded locks I was pleasantly surprised to actually notice a difference: the combed top produced a nice, smooth, more lustrous worsted yarn that still had some cloud to it but was less cloudy than the other skein.

Now, any experienced spinners reading this are probably laughing. "Well, of course that's what you're going to get with it, silly." This is Spinning 101 stuff for those that don't know; woolen yarns are fluffier, have more air pockets between the fibers, and are generally cloudier. This is because the fibers aren't spun parallel to each other -- they're in a more random arrangement, producing a yarn that will be warmer and fluffier, suitable for garments that you want to be warm and fluffy. Woolen yarns are usually produced by carding fibers, which arranges the fibers a bit more randomly and usually perpendicular to the direction in which you're going to spin them. Worsted yarns, on the other hand, are produced by combing the fibers so that they lie parallel to one another. Spinning them produces a more compact and lustrous yarn that has a stronger tensile strength and will pill less. The yarn would be less suitable for a garment you want to be warm and fluffy -- or a garment that you'd want to retain its warmth when wet, like a fisherman's sweater -- but would be perfect for something that's going to get a lot of wear, such as a pair of socks. It's possible to spin a semi-worsted or semi-woolen yarn that has a little of both properties to it by varying your spinning technique on combed top.

So getting an actual worsted yarn from fleece that I turned into combed top isn't exactly a revelation. But this is the first time I've ever actually approached my spinning in any kind of scientific way, producing different preparations and analyzing what my own hands actually produce from start to finish. Being able to see that yes, I actually do produce two different types of yarn when I do two different types of fiber preparation, and that those preparations turn out as the books tell me they should, is very gratifying.

Now I had to decide which preparation I wanted to use for my finished item. I knit test swatches with both skeins and was surprised to find that visually there was almost no distinction between the two. The worsted skein produced maybe a slightly less cloudy and more even swatch, but you had to really look closely to see that. How they felt, however, was completely different. The flick-carded yarn produced a much loftier swatch; it felt thicker and squishier. The worsted skein produced a thinner swatch that felt like it had better drape.

Shawls typically are soft, cloudy, and don't need to be made from worsted yarns as they're unlikely to be worn to the same degree as, say, a pair of socks. The logical conclusion, then, is that I should go with the flick-carded locks and produce a semi-woolen yarn. But when I looked at both swatches I had to admit that I simply liked the feel of the worsted yarn and its resulting fabric better. It still had a lot of cloudiness to it but had a drape that would fit a shawl nicely and had a much more even look to it. It also helped that spinning the resulting combed top was exceptionally easy -- it just spun like a dream. Spinning the flick-carded locks, on the other hand, resulted in a slightly less even yarn. The combed top produced a more consistent yarn that was easier to get close to low sport weight or fingering weight than the flick-carded locks.

So at this point I'm combing the fleece into combed top birds' nests, and those will be spun on my drop spindle into a 2-ply yarn that will be plied on my Louet wheel. More pictures to come as Project Silverton continues.

Enjoy more Fiber Arts Friday posts!