Baby Alpaca yarn

The other day I washed a batch of Alpaca. The finest, snuggliest baby Alpaca, to be precise. This is the Alpaca from this local farm I wrote about a while back. The colour of the fibre is called Rose grey and is basically a light grey with beautiful brown tips. The resulting yarn has a really nice mélange of colours. The first picture shows the washed fibre - it took me 6 washes before the water was reasonably clear, washing your fibre is really quite time consuming! The second picture shows the rolags I carded on my hand carders. I mixed in some hand dyed Merino/silk, pure tussah silk, Angora fibre and hand dyed silk noil to achieve the look you can see on the yarn in the third picture. The finished yarn has been wrapped in a bouclé thread and also has big transparent rocaille glass beads spun in.

I carded some more of this Alpaca fibre with Angelina and more hand dyed Merino/silk to spin a really sweet 2ply yarn from it, but it is currently being washed, so no pictures yet. :)