About

More About Fleece

Care and preparation

Clean fleeces, desired by handspinners and mills alike, begin with clean pastures. Easier said than done for some of us. Our farm was a filbert (hazelnut) orchard, planted in the1930s, and we valued it for its history as well as its shade. But that meant our alpacas' fleeces pick up bits of bark, nut shells, even twigs.

So the day of shearing, we clean our alpacas. The huacayas are blown out with a "reverse vacuum." Some people actually vacuum their animals, but that hasn't worked as well for us.

The blower seems to matt the suris' fleece very easily, so they are brushed with a rubber curry mitt, designed for horses.

If the fleece is to be entered in a show, we leave it alone; we don't want to destroy its
architecture - the lock structure, crimp, etc. We gently hand pick as much as possible before shearing, then finish the job with the fleece laid out on a skirting table.

The shearer has removed the blanket first, then the neck, and finally the legs; these went into three different bags. The shearer is experienced at clipping these areas separately, but occasionally some leg wool has made its way into the first bag, or possibly part of the blanket is shorter or coarser in one area. The next step is to skirt it - to remove vegetative matter and non-uniform areas.

We* skirt the fleece similarly, whether it is going to a mill, a

handspinner, or a show. We pull out as much debris as possible,

plus any inconsistent patches of fleece. If the alpaca was sick

during the year or suffered any other stress, we test several

locks of fleece for tenderness or breakage.

Although alpaca can be spun straight from the bag, it's usually

dusty enough that most spinners prefer to wash and card or

comb it.
We put batches of fleece into a mesh lingerie bag and fill our

top-loading washer with warm water and a gentle fiber wash

like Unicorn (if you use Dawn, be sure it doesn't have protein

dissolving enzymes) - since there's no lanolin, we don't need to

use hot water.

We gently push the bag of fleece into the water, let it soak for 20 or so minutes, then let the washer spin it. We refill the washer with water of the same temperature and again lower the bag to rinse the fleece, then spin it again. We may need to repeat the washing and rinsing until the water runs clear.
To avoid making felt, we keep the water temperature constant and are careful not to run
water over the fleece or to agitate it.

After it's dried, we run it through the carder. English combs also work well, especially if the fleece has matted.