Trenchwork

Well, I feel as if I’m taking two steps forward and one step back. This weekend, I decided to try my hand at spinning alpaca. I had originally intended to spin it at a laceweight and ply it with silk, but I realized fairly quickly that the fiber was a bit too coarse for what I wanted, so I decided to just spin the stuff and see what I learned along the way. This is what I ended up with.

The Stats.

Fiber: Alpaca (medium grade “Almost White”), from Copper Moose.
Finished Weight: just less than a pound.
Yardage: ca 500 yards.
WPI: ca 15 in the first 8 ounces, 13 in the second.
Spun on: Rose.
Dye: Jacquard’s “Sky Blue”

The Lessons.

First, alpaca—at least, this alpaca—is incredibly hairy stuff. Even with a pillowcase to catch the fallout, the stuff was everywhere. I gave up on dusting and vacuuming (admittedly not a hardship in the first place) until the plied yarn was safely dumped into the dye pot.

The staple length was very long; individual hairs measured out at longer than 6 inches. The fiber was slippery, and surprisingly fuzzy. Even smoothing the drafting point into the spin didn’t eliminate the fuzziness, although some of that fuzz seemed to disappear during the plying process, and more so once the twist was set and the yarn was dyed. Some of the individual fibers or clumps of fibers seemed to crimp in odd ways. It was also surprisingly scratchy, but I’m convinced that most of that is because it’s a medium grade rather than a fine grade fiber. I’m also wondering if this fiber has more guard hairs in it than the other. I often felt hard strands that I couldn’t see, and that may be the source of the scratchy feel. When I tried spinning it thin, it felt hard, and rather harsh. It seemed to prefer becoming a more open and slightly thicker yarn, which gave those errant individual hairs a chance to be buried in the surrounding single. This was the first time I really understood that not all fiber of the same breed/race are created equal. It still makes a nice yarn, but it’s not something that could be used for next-to-skin wear.

As a second note, the yarn has a bit of a luster. I used Jacquard’s “sky blue” acid dye in an immersion bath, and I see that not all the fibers are equally solid in color. There are faint light spots here and there, and I’m not certain why. I DO see that a couple of places below the figure-8 ties are just a hair lighter than the surrounding yarn (my bad; they must have been tied a bit too tight), but it’s not enough to create a problem, and blends in with the other lighter spots so won’t be distinctive in a knitted fabric. But, I’m still a bit perplexed about the uneven coloring. The dye bath was exhausted and the yarn rinsed clean with no runoff, so I know it wasn’t a matter of not absorbing the color, or losing color in the wash. Had I added more dye, the yarn would have been darker, and I didn’t want a darker color. That leaves me wondering whether alpaca takes up dye differently than wool, or if the dye technique needs to be a bit different.

Things settled down a bit in the second 8 ounces and I started to feel as if I was getting a handle on what I was doing. The yarn in this batch is much more even, and much more consistent, both in the singles and in the ply.

(The darker shades in the upper left quadrant is correct; the rest is a bit light.)  I know this is a learning process, and I’m relatively comfortable with the second 8 ounces, all other things considered. But this spin is definitely not what I’d intended, and the first 8 ounces is not spinning I’m particularly proud of. I think it gave me a valuable lesson about learning what the fiber wants to be, so to speak, and adjusting expectations and goals to match the fiber’s qualities, but it’s definitely not the most consistent thing I’ve spun, and is—in my humble opinion—only marginally better than Spin 1.