Picking Party

Yesterday (after the rains subsided) I spent the afternoon trying to finish picking through the pound of white alpaca fiber.

After two hours outside sifting through fiber, I'm still not more than halfway done. I do have a nice sandals tan on my feet. *Sigh*

I may be MIA for awhile until this is finished. I really really need to get going, since I have 2 lbs of black alpaca and then two black garbage bags of fleece from my sister-in-law... and eventually when all this is finished I can start carding and spinning for the husband's mittens.

Maybe the mittens will be done before next winter...

Progress on Alpaca

Saturday, Shell came over so that we could make headway begin cleaning alpaca fleeces. She has 3+ lbs of alpaca, and I, 2+ and all of it really hasn't been touched. We figured we'd be more likely to work on our respective fleeces if we did them together.

We set up in the carport and sat down to start picking through the fleeces before washing.

Atlas helped out by being the "alpaca inspector"...






This bit was below his standards.






He also doubled as a guard for the unusable fibers.

At the end of 4 hours, each of us managed to make it through just over 4 oz of fiber. Hopefully some time this coming week we will be able to get together again and plow through more.

From Sheep to FO

I’ve begun my first sheep to finished object project, the goal is a pair of warm mittens for the husband. The plan is to use some of the Jacob’s cross wool that the SiL gave us and some of the alpaca fleece that husband picked out this year at SAFF. Hopefully carded together will result in a warm, springy batt.

Some of the wool has already been washed and has been sitting in a pillowcase for a while, so this weekend I began washing small portions of the alpaca.

I’ve decided, for no particular reason to go ahead and make batts of the wool and later card the clean alpaca into the wool batts. I think this may be easier than waiting and trying to card both together at once. Then again, this will be my first try at blending so I’m winging it. I do know that the finished batts will probably be run through the carder at least 4 times, to ensure an even distribution of fibers.

My test run - There are some bits of silk in there from when we were playing with the carder after SAFF...

Hopefully I can have enough (I’m thinking about 6 oz worth) carded by the weekend so next week I can spin and knit!