Nancy Carr on Spinning Alpaca vs. Spinning Wool

Nancy Carr on Spinning Alpaca vs. Spinning Wool

Shaelagh Cull

Nancy Carr

Malting Tower at the Tett Centre

It's been a long time since I've spun wool. I didn't find that it was a huge transition from spinning wool to spinning alpaca. Certainly in the old days, like 30 years ago or so, people would say, Oh, you have to put a lot more twist into spinning alpaca than when you're spinning sheep's wool. But the alpaca fleece that was available that long ago was actually not very good alpaca; it was very coarse. So certainly the seminars that I've given, I have said "Don't put a whole lot of twist in it, or you're going to really make it feel harsh and overly spun." So for me personally, I don't find a huge difference. Personally, I didn't think oh, I've got to really change how I'm spinning. Most of it is a lot softer than wool. Of course, there are gradations of wool. There's Merino wool, which is the finest wool. So fine Merino can certainly be finer than some coarser alpaca. The other thing is you can spin alpaca raw. Alpaca, you don't have to wash first, you can just card it and then spin it because you're going to be washing your yarn afterwards. Whether you start with washed fleece or not, you always wash your yarn after it is spun in order to set the twist in the yarn. So in that way, you could say if you're starting with raw wool or raw alpaca, there's less preparation involved in getting ready to spin alpaca. With sheep's wool, you have a lot of washing with hot water and soap to get the lanolin and all the dirt out. And you don't have to do that with alpaca. It's still dirty, it has a lot of dust in it, but it doesn't have the grease of sheep's wool. So that would be one of the big differences.