Sunday, April 19, 2015

Andrew's creations!

As part of the start-up of our mill, we have sent Andrew to train in America with one of their top mills, Lynn from Olympic Yarn and Fibre. He has learnt so much and part of what worked through whilst he was there was some of Lynn's alpaca fibre as a bit of a test! This is what he created!


Alpaca fibre has such beautiful colours and blending the fleece from a few alpacas can create something really unique. When choosing the colours to use for my training here I thought it would be interesting to capture the change as the fleece was blended through the process. So here is the starting point, some brown, black and white huacaya alpaca fleece blended with a little suri grey, lets see what it creates!

Fleece on sorting table waiting to be processed
Into the opener



From some brown, black and white with a little Suri grey, you can see the stages of blending ready to go through the carder for the first pass.
First stage roving/sliver after carder

Rovings from the carder ready for the pin drafter. The pin drafter takes 4 slivers and combines them as well as a drawing it out for the first draft. This will "average" out the sliver and will both continue to blend the colours and reduce the imperfections.
Stacks of rovings/slivers ready for the spinner below!

Second stage roving after pin drafter
The sliver/roving is then fed into the spinner.

Rovings/sliver going into spinner
Plyed yarn still on the bobin.


Yarn 1 - Andrew 0!
Here's a picture of me hand winding back to the bobin from a skein after I managed not to completely close the gates and had a run of slightly short skeins... argh!!


The final product, simply gorgeous!
On skeins!

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