Mad Caterpillar

A few months ago I went to a spin-in at my LYS and they had some new Alpaca fleece (blankets?) for sale. They had several different colors to tempt us with – white, grey, cinnamon, brown – all fluffy and soft and begging to be spun. I simply couldn’t resist, and ended up with a big bagful of some gorgeous dark reddish-brown fleece. Never having spun alpaca before, I asked one of the women who had already started spinning hers up for some tips. She said that the fiber, which was unprepared and unwashed, should not be washed prior to spinning, and that it could be carded or spun right from the locks.

Life intervened and I didn’t have much time for spinning over the next few months, but last week I was finally able to make some time to spin, and dove into my bag of alpaca. I spun up a small flick-carded handful on a drop spindle first, just to sample the fiber before getting out the wheel, and andean-plyed the result into a two-ply. The sample looked a little lifeless – the yarn was matte and had absolutely no luster. After a warm soapy bath and rinse it brightened up considerably, and I knit up a teeny tiny sample to see what the resulting fabric would look like:

That got me all excited – this little square of alpaca had subtle auburn highlights and was oh-so-soft. Just right for a pair of fingerless mitts, so now I had an end project in mind. It seemed like a good idea to plan on spinning the alpaca into a three-ply yarn so that it would be more resilient for this purpose.

I decided not to spin right from the locks – while the fleece was very clean and fluffy, some of the pieces were clumped together and I did not want to flick card some pieces and not others. I decided to hand card the whole batch. It was a pleasure to do – the fiber was easy to card, did not tangle up despite my novice carding technique and brushed out with little effort. I ended up with two small baskets filled with fluffy, cocoa-colored clouds that looked like this:

Then the spinning began. The alpaca rolags drafted effortlessly, but it was not the soft-on-the-hands dreamy spinning experience I expected. I mentioned earlier that the fleece was very clean – only a little dirt came out during the handcarding process, and there was absolutely no odor, wooly or otherwise. But there was something in the alpaca that caused it to feel tacky, almost sticky even, as I drafted it. I don’t know if this is the alpaca version of lanolin, but it didn’t really feel like spinning greasy wool. It almost felt like there was a film of clay on the stuff as the twist started to take hold. As I spun, whatever this was (oil? dirt? something I’d rather not know about?) came off on my fingers:

It was an effort to get this stuff off my hands. Took a lot of rubbing with soap and warm water, and even after my hands were clean I could feel the residue. My hands didn’t feel soft like they do sometimes when spinning wool that isn’t super-clean. Again, there was that feeling of having a thin film of clay on them. It’s hard to describe, but there it is.

Here’s what I ended up with:

The matte effect that I had seen on the drop spindle was really evident here -- it looked like the bobbin had been dusted with cocoa powder!

I didn’t get the chance to navajo ply the bobbin until a few days later. It was harder than I expected – the tackiness that I’d felt while spinning caused a good deal of friction when pulling the single through the chained loop. For the most part this wasn’t a problem, but it did cause me some grief as I got to the end of the bobbin. It turned out that while spinning I had started to add more and more twist to the single as I went along. It's a good thing I did this, because the yarn at the start of the bobbin had a lot less twist in it. This caused the single to break a lot while navajo plying. It’s not so much fun to deal with breakage while navajo plying, plus I probably lost a good five yards to this mistake.

It took three dunks in a warm soapy bath to clean up the finished yarn, but here it is:

I ended up with approximately 81 yards. Not enough for the intended project – I had hoped to have enough for adult-sized fingerless mitts. But my little guy needs a pair for next fall so I’ll stick with the plan, just reduced in size.

What I learned from this spinning experience:

1: Alpaca is a delight to hand card.

2: For shorter-staple fibers like this, it seems there is a fine line between adding enough twist to withstand the rigors of navajo plying, and not adding enough. I haven’t figured out where this line is yet.

3: I really need to practice Navajo plying more – these joins look plain awful!

4: It is very difficult to spin a consistent-width singles yarn from a carded alpaca rolag. Either that, or I need more practice. (All right, I know I need more practice.)

5: Next time, BUY MORE ALPACA! My seemingly huge herkin’ bag only netted me a grand total of 81 yards of three-ply approximately-worsted-weight:

Sigh. It’s not the prettiest skein I’ve ever spun, but I think the knitted fabric will look fine. I have another bag of some whitish-grey alpaca to try out next time, so hopefully the lessons learned while spinning this will help me to get better results next time. Stay tuned.