Spinning Alpaca From Three Different Preparations

 I'm feeling the love for Alpaca right now. The brown one is made from my friend's batts. I wrote about before on this blog. The middle gray one is some random unwashed raw alpaca that someone gifted me. I hand carded that one. The light gray was made from roving that is an alpaca/silk blend.  I washed all these skeins today and noticed all the difference regarding the prep. The raw fleece that I carded (middle, dark grey) was really dirty. The batt was pretty dirty too. The roving was clean and just needed a soak. All were made into a lace-weight 2 ply yarn. All are natural colors.

brown = batt
dark grey = raw
light grey = roving

From Raw Fleece to Finished Yarn

I started with 8 oz of raw Romney.
I washed it carefully with Dawn to get the as clean as I could. Then I used my Fricke flick carder to prep the fibers.
Spun some singles...
Plied it onto my big bobbin... Soaked it, dried it, twisted into a skein.
In the end I had a 5 oz skein of yarn. So that's 3 oz of grime and dirt and seconds flicked out during the prep process.