More Fibre & Silk & Fleece etc....

While having a sort through when looking for the Suri Alpaca fibre I found these:

65% Alpaca

15% Merino

20% Silk

135g

Beautifully soft carded fibre.

Multiple batches of silk hankies (mawata) that I dyed a very long time ago.

What a nice feeling to find things I had forgotten about as they have been sitting hidden in a box in a cupboard for so long. I've always meant to get around to having a go spinning the silk hankies ~ maybe next week.

I spent a leisurely hour in the sunshine working on the Gotland fleece. I washed it a few days ago, it was extremely dirty ~  think it had 4 or 5 scours in total. Using really hot water and some wool scour, I divided the fleece up into multiple batches of 100g or so then put it in small mesh bags. The water was filthy in the first 3 scours. I also rinsed it in hot water then laid it out to dry on an airing rack.

Afterwards I read up about Gotland fleece and found out that it felts easily and not to use hot water lol! Mine survived the washing process, but I don't agitate the fibre when washing ~ just letting it sit in the hot water for 5 minutes is enough, then lift out the bags, repeating the soaking process until the water is clean. It's now all clean, dry and ready for combing:

A few locks that I've combed to sample the fibre. Looking forward to seeing how it spins.

Spinning Suri Alpaca...

65% suri alpaca
20% hand dyed merino
15% hand dyed silk
125g

A beautiful fibre blend that I'm spinning as a fine single and will possibly 'N' ply it. The Suri and the silk both add a lovely sheen. Looking forward to finishing this one!

Carded Alpaca Fibre......

I got my alpaca fibre back from the carders just before Christmas but I haven't had time to look at it it until recently. I'm really happy with it. This is the rest of little Saturn's fleece, I had it blended with 30% fine merino fibre:

It's wonderfully soft and fluffy, just like clouds. There's 1.6 kg.













This is the rest of Chantalini's fleece, I kept this one as 100% alpaca. It was a deep fawn with white patches so the white fibre was blended in together with the darker and it's come out as a mid fawn, much different to the fibre (from the same alpaca) that I hand prepped and blogged about here. It weighs 3kg and is also lovely and clean and soft:

The shearer came last week so now there's 4 more fleeces to contend with but they shouldn't take me as long to clean as the last 4, they are much cleaner to start with. I learned my lesson, I now rake out their shelter every 2 weeks which cuts down on fleece contamination with the dreaded V.M. I'm still working on cleaning Radar's chocolate brown fleece from last year, and am about halfway through it, 4 bags of it washed and dried today as we have superb weather and I have a rare day off work.



I'm going to clean up Caesar and Jupiter's fleece and get them sent off to the carders, but I would like to do Saturn's and Radar's myself again. I just wish it wasn't so time consuming. But, I enjoy it and love spinning hand combed fibre, for me there's just nothing that compares to it.