Gift Knitting (Part 4)

Whereas some of my spinning-to-knitting projects in the past have been from ALMOST first principles, this one could not have started at an earlier point in the process without owning livestock.

A few years ago when I was first learning to spin, a friend of my in-laws sent me a raw fleece from one of her alpacas. It was a beautiful caramel colour and wonderfully soft. I consulted You Tube, decided not to try to wash the fleece but spin it dirty instead, purchased a pair of hand carders and set to work.

I still don't really think I'm carding properly or efficiently, but I managed to produce some rollags from which I could spin and produced a reasonably respectable single (if a little thick and thin in places).

This was N-plied to form a 3 ply which was approximately DK weight and given a good wash. And here the yarn sat for a couple of years until December last year.

We were going down to my in-laws for Christmas and for the first time since I received the fleece, the friend who had sent me it would be there, so I decided to knit her a Christmas gift from her own Alpaca.

A little swatching told me that the Basic Cable Hat by Christine Quirion would be a good match for the yarn so I crossed my fingers that I would have the yardage needed and started knitting.

I knitted the hat on 5mm DPNs and gave it a good wash post-knitting in soak. I sqeezed in on the yardage front with less than a metre left over. The wonderful caramel colour of the original fleece had been a bit obscured during the prep and spinning process by the dirt and oil on the fibre, but it really came out again after a good wash.

Sadly, the remainder of the fleece that I had stored unprocessed was discovered by some mice who found that it made a wonderfully soft and warm winter home. It's now becoming lovely rich compost in my compost bin!

Caramel Alpaca

The whole recent spinning thing was instigated by a random conversation with a friend of my in-laws 18 months ago. She has five alpacas of varying colours that she keeps and I asked where she sold their fleeces onto when they were sheared. 'Nowhere' came the reply 'we just throw them away'. I was really surprised by this and explained that alpaca is a lovely fibre to knit with and that surely some small-scale spinner would use them...

...skip forward a few months and the in-laws came to visit. My FIL handed me a large sturdy carrier bag full of caramel coloured alpaca fluff. They'd been sheared and could I use some?

At that time, I didn't know how to spin and wasn't sure that I really wanted to learn (there's only so much time and another fibre-related obsession would detract from knitting time). The idea must have grown on me though, as, a couple of months later I bought a drop spindle at Woolfest, then recently I learned to use it and bought the hand carders needed to card the fleece.



I've been combing raw, unwashed fleece into these light and airy rolags...


Which spin up into a fairly fine single.


I then navajo-plied them and washed the yarn in the skein.


The finished product is a little underspun so I'm going to work on that in the next batch, but for now, I have about 100m of caramel coloured 100% alpaca yarn processed entirely from the raw fleece by hand.