Last month (and on my birthday no less) I picked up over a dozen bags of alpaca fleece – and I didn’t pay a cent for them. Above you see my trunk – filled to the brim.
Mother’s Day is a holiday I don’t care much for, but for the majority of the afternoon the weather was nice to sit out on the deck off my studio and do some picking. I have been (im)patiently waiting for a day to go through some of this, not really knowing what condition the fleece would be in. It had been stored for sometime, in a shed – so somewhat exposed to the elements and critters.
I only got through one bag before the fog rolled in, but boy, did I ever pick a great bag to start with! The fleece came out in all one piece – and you could picture how this laid on the animal. It is a beautiful butterscotch/cream color -probably my fave alpaca color. It’s shorn nicely with very few second cuts – and a low to moderate amount of VM (vegetable matter). Pretty much not at all dusty. It is also quite long stapled as shown in the picture below.
I separated this into two bags: one with the fleece with very little VM, and then a bag of seconds that has a ton of VM and is stained/discolored. The seconds batch I will do first: comb and card out the Vm and then most likely dye since the color is uneven. I will store the bag of “firsts” for now. i like to experiment with the lower quality first before diving into the good stuff. 🙂
I’m ready to start my second bag and it’s not so great as it has a ton of VM – but, it will still be nice fleece to work with, it just needs more elbow grease to remove the unwanted bits. I will chronicle the processing of this fleece as I go. BTW – this is the view from my studio – isn’t it breath taking? When the fog doesn’t roll in, that is…
