I’ve started a new spinning project. It’s a roving I made several years ago for sale at Black Sheep Gathering. The remaining inventory has been hauled to and from shows, bounded around the house, and most recently, moved across the country. It’s a little shopworn, so I’ve decided to spin it myself.

The roving is 60% suri alpaca and 40% huacaya alpaca. The suri is very long, fawn, and not very soft. In fact, it has been rejected for machine processing due to length, and when I first spun it, I almost threw it away because the resulting yarn felt like baler twine. I’ve since learned how to handle this fiber and I’m really enjoying it – and making a yarn that feels much softer than the raw fiber. There are two tricks to this suri – first is to make sure I’m not folding or kinking it in the processing. It doesn’t have to be spun worsted, any fibers that get folded make very prickly points – so don’t fold the fibers. The second trick I’ve discovered with this fiber is that I can blend this not soft suri with not very soft huacaya and end up with a roving that’s softer than either fiber.

The huacaya fiber in this roving is variable length and not particularly soft black and brown huacaya – still good fiber, but not the softest I have. Because the suri is over two years growth, even the longest huacaya fibers in the blend are much shorter than the suri fibers – which was a bit of a trick in the carding process. I achieved the blending by layering the fiber onto my carder and then re-carding the resulting batts.

The roving looks like this:

Color accuracy is good, but not great. The roving is actually a little richer in color than the picture shows. Note the long fawn and cream suri fibers and the patches of darker huacaya fibers.

I’m spinning the fiber semi-worsted using a very long, narrow drafting triangle. The shorter huacaya fibers do get drafted, but not to the extent the suri does and the huacaya does float through the drafting triangle to some extent. As a result, the suri is spun under greater tension than the huacaya and the huacaya tends to float into the drafting triangle where it gets wrapped by the longer suri fibers. The floating effect is incomplete. I’m still drafting the huacaya to maintain uniform yarn diameter and some of the huacaya does get stretched out in the drafting triangle. The result is that some of the huacaya is spun and some is wrapped by suri fiber to form sort of a core of the yarn and some does a little of each. It’s an interesting and pretty yarn.

Here it is on the wheel:

And here it is up close:

Again, the colors are a little richer than shown in the pictures.

So far, the yarn seems to be holding the softness of the roving – that is softer than any of the parent fibers in the blend. Final analysis of softness must come after plying, because the single is a little overspun and hard at this point. I’m having fun with the spinning and I think I’m making some nice yarn.

Oh, and in garden news, we’ve got tomatoes.