Monday, December 17, 2012

magic?

It's not magic though it sort of looks that way from here:


From fiber to yarn just like that!

Actually a lot of work went into getting it from the one to the other.

First there are the alpacas who grow the fiber on their backs.  We care for them, twice a day feedings and once a day barn yard cleanup.

Each spring we shear the fiber off of them.

From there the fiber is skirted (we pick out the little pieces of hay etc.).

Then I weigh out small sections of the fiber from their blanket, so that I have a batch of fiber.

I tumble it in our fiber tumbler.

We flick it into a cloud and then we get to this step, from cloud to strand of yarn :)

All in a days work here at our farm.

2 comments:

A Country Chicken said...

Hi, have you written a blog on how you actually spin the fiber into yarn? I have never done this before and would love to try. I have clean fiber ready to go! Hubby has bought me a hand-held drop-spindle thing for Xmas LOL! :) Lisa

oak haven alpacas said...

Lisa, that is a great question. It's hard to put to words the action of drafting the fiber into the wheel for spinning.

To be honest, I have only ever used a drop spindle once, and I did that with a roving of wool. I don't know that I could spin raw fiber on a drop spindle, I don't have the coordination. But I will put together some posts to show how I spin on the wheel, it might give you some ideas :)

Cara

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