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While my family was on a camping trip in Vermont, we visited Showshoe Farm to meet their alpacas. They have a herd of about 30 alpacas, from black to silver to cinnamon to tan to white. Baby alpacas are called crias and one of the crias was just born the day before we visited. That one was still wobbly and fell over. I got to pet some of them, but there was one girl alpaca who was going to give birth soon and she was very grumpy. Terry, who owns the farm, said alpacas spit when they're upset. The spit is green and smells bad, so I stayed back and gave them plenty of room. They were all curious, but kind of shy too. Alpacas can live 15-20 years and are shorn once a year, producing 3-4 pounds of fiber with each shearing. They make a sound called humming, but it sounds like cows mooing.
Alpaca fiber has no lanolin, so it has to be treated differently than
wool. This means it has to be sent to a special mill for processing. I
have a bag of Joselyn's white fiber and started to spin it on my drop
spindle. Alpaca fiber is pretty slippery, so it drafted easily, but I
had to draft it gently so it didn't pull apart. I made a little sample
of On the spinning wheel, I did one ply in cinnamon brownish, and the other ply in Joselyn's white. The cinnamon fiber was pencil roving, so it was very easy to spin and went very quickly. When I plied my yarn, it was pretty good, but I didn't give it enough twist in the plying, so I plied it again with more twist. The yarn looks like a cinnamon and white candy cane, but it wouldn't be as tasty. The swatch I knit from the yarn is very pretty. The candy cane stripes of the yarn don't show up in the swatch. The knit fabric is more randomly blended, brown and white. It's fuzzy and soft, so I think it would make good mittens. Luckily, I just learned how to make mittens and am almost done with my first pair. For my alpaca mittens, I would make the hands out of the white fiber and the cuffs out of the blended brown and white, so it would look like hot cocoa and marshmallows.
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