Welcome to the Artful Alpaca! I feature both my millspun yarns as well as my handspun yarns. All my product is hand-dyed and hand-knitted or felted by me here at my farm. I refuse to limit myself to alpaca yarn, as I love so many fibers that are out there, but I am very focused on spinning only the very finest of yarns.
My hats are custom order, although I do have a few that require finishing touches (I add a silk hand-dyed band as well as an internal sweat band before I will sell my hats) that are available currently. Contact me if you would like to see images. Again, all yarn is hand-dyed, handspun by me, then knitted and fulled.
I love all manner of fibers, and my current passion is spinning fingering weight single ply yarns. I fell in love with a 330 yard skein of fingering weight single ply that was richly hand-dyed and it started me on a mission to binge-spin everything from silk (tussah, bombyx, mulberry) to kid mohair to grade 1 alpaca to merino and even tencel. I am in process of dyeing all of this in the skein at this point. Contact me if you would like to see what I am producing on this order, especially if you enjoy knitting lace patterns! I am just learning, on my own, how to knit lace patterns and oh, is that fun!
My alpaca herd is predominantly white in color, for a reason. I am aiming for extreme lasting fineness -- and I am getting it. I also select for fleece traits that may be a bit beyond the focus of many breeders. We are seeing mean curvatures in the high 60s and high 70s in my newer production animals. Commercial processors are known to desire high curvature, even though, to my naked eye, curvature is simply not something I can "see." Now, from my own home-produced foundation females, I am doing a boutique gray fleece program here. It is going to take a little longer to produce the quality and type I am seeking as I am not "buying stock" to do this. I bring in a top quality gray male on a lease basis each year. If my next two gray breedings result in female grays, I will be able to say I will be selling gray breeding stock in the succeeding generation. But I am a dye enthusiast and have been for many years and my principal reason for adding grays is quite simple -- it over dyes to the most amazing heathered shades!
As the tagline for a friend used to say "Fleece is the bottom line."