Alpaca Walk and Talk!

 For Mother's Day, I received a gift certificate for an Alpaca Walk at S.A.M.Y's Alpaca Farm.   My husband had arranged this with my daughter.   We weren't quite on the ball when we reserved our dates, so ended up going in September.  It was a wildly windy day, but the rain held off and temperature was  perfect, just comfortable.

When we arrived, we were greeted by an absolutely enormous St. Bernard dog.  He was an overly friendly, energetic, but gentle and somewhat slobbery giant.  We were told his background story: he was a rescue, and it's amazing that he is as well socialized and friendly as he is.

 The gal, whose name I don't remember, who hosted our adventure, was extremely knowledgeable.  Her talk included a ton of information and she answered our questions nicely.  She was welcoming, friendly and put us at ease immediately.

We got to bottle feed Elizabeth, who was an orphan alpaca.  She's 5 months old here, and really didn't need a lot of feeding.   It was fun to do though.

We were given containers of sweet feed to feed to the ladies, who  were a tad pushy, but not aggressive. They did like the grain and weren't pushy towards us, but towards each other, vying for that little handful of grain and molasses.  The girls were incredibly gentle to us, veritable strangers in their midst.
They have several guard llamas who were very gentle as well.  I'd only met very aggressive  llamas in the past, so this was a good experience.  The stories told, showed us the llamas were worth their while, since they had trampled several coyotes in the past and kept the herd safe from predators.

After meeting the girls and doing a walk by the boys, we went into the barn where we met the working boys, who do the walks.  There were 5 of them, who were pretty, trained to walk on a lead and quite accepting of strangers.   We got to choose from 3, as 2 of the alpaca had already been out in the morning.    They were easy to halter and lead nicely, however Rusty, my daughter's pick, wasn't happy about being on the roadside.   With the wind, I could hear the chuff, chuff, chuff of the wind turbines in the distance, so I wondered what the alpaca could hear and if that was why they weren't overly enthusiastic about walking outside.  So when my alpaca decided to balk as well, we went the opposite way and got a short walk in the other side.  We were told that usually they are quite compliant and enjoy the walks.   They were certainly appreciative of the little patches of alfalfa clover that we lead them to here and there along the way.

Nope, not going there!

This was a fun way to spend a couple of hours and I think well worth the nominal fee.   I would have brought home a fleece, if Nick's fleece had been in the little shop.  He's a dark grey and was incredibly soft.  The other items were quite reasonably priced, however I didn't need a mug, no matter how cute it was and I don't generally buy yarn.
I have to give kudos to hubby for finding this place and making arrangements for me to visit.  It was brilliant!

Nick sure liked his hay. I liked his fleece!

Alpaca

The first time I went to Olds Fibre Week, was just after the devastating floods.   As we flew towards the Calgary airport, you could see the swaths of water, creating ponds and lakes where farmland should have been.  A local spinning guild had a space in the sales room where they were running a fundraiser for one of their members who had been affected by the flood.   They knew someone who had alpaca but they were just pets.  In exchange for shearing the animals, the guild got to keep the fleeces, which they were selling off to help their member replace equipment.   They had a number of different fleeces, all for $20 a piece.   I was happy to help and it was a pretty small fleece, so I could find the space for it in my luggage. 
 It was grey.  It looked grey.  They said it was grey.   I thought it was grey.

I fit it all into several large ziplock bags and yesterday I emptied one of those into a net bag and within 2 minutes of setting it into a laundry tub with hot water and Dawn dish washing liquid, it looked like this.   I figured that maybe it wasn't quite such a grey fleece after all.   The second wash water was fairly clean.  It only took 2 rinses.

Oh my!  It is white, really white.  It's not the finest alpaca.   There is a bit of guard hair that I've been pulling out.  Some of the hair is obviously neck or maybe belly/leg hair.   But that which isn't guard hair or thicker and short, is quite nice.   With a little bit of work, it will be a great bit of fibre for blending with some Merino.   Plus with all that white, it is a great canvas for dyeing.


A good few years ago, a friend of mine from Tenn. was visiting family in N.Y. where she stopped to visit an alpaca breeder who was selling off the previous years fleeces for next to nothing.  She sent me a whole box of fleeces (2 of them) for a Christmas present that year.   I'm still working my way through it.  This is the rest of the first one.  It is prime alpaca, with no guard hair and I'm guessing only the blanket.  It's a lovely light fawn colour and the other one is a bit darker.   This fleece will be so enjoyable to work with, since it will require almost no effort.  It has no vm and required only one washing to get it clean.   It's first wash water was cleaner than the second one from the above!

Finished Scarves and Spinning

Wool/silk scarves with painted warps.

 The scarves are off the loom :).  They are a wool silk blend, with hand painted warps using weak acid dyes. These were the very old mixed dyes that, despite being a bit gelled and flakey, worked just fine.   I wouldn't use the old dyes for precision dyeing like percentages or specific colours, but for a random dyeing experiment like this, they were fine.

50% alpaca/50% merino blend

Carol gave me a lovely bit of alpaca carded batt that she had gotten back from her processor as unsuitable for spinning.  However, it's lovely stuff and here I've blended with Merino to make a 50% Alpaca/50% Merino blend.   I just weighed out 10 g of alpaca and 10g of Merino and after 2 passes on the drum carder they were nicely blended and awesomely soft batts.  They spun like butter, save for an occasional little nep or fluffy bit.   This fibre is definitely a handspinners delight.   I had some natural black Merino in my stash, which wasn't actually black, but a dark brown and it fit perfectly with the brown Alpaca.

Kevin doing his annual autumnal plant inspection.

I have a lemon and a time tree which spend the summer out on the deck.   Sadly, the nights are cool enough now, that it was time to bring them back in.  Kevin always find some sort of interesting poking about when that happens.   The lime tree is a key lime and is loaded with fruit!   I sometimes wish I had  gotten a persian lime, because they are thornless and the key lime is quite spikey, but it also seems to be a prolific fruit bearer, so I can't really complain.   They lemon tree however, came with a notice that it would never be a tree, due to how they'd pruned it, so it is just a messy little thing.  It looks like someone just stuck a branch in the ground and it rooted, but it bears lemons and that in itself is pretty awesome.

Carol's Alpaca Days

This little girl was humming away in the barn.

 One of our guild members, Carol, has a small herd of alpaca.  This weekend was her open house.  While a small event, it was loads of fun, with family activities, treats and of course friendly alpaca.  The farm is extremely beautiful, in a gorgeous setting.  This would have been a fun, family activity.

I was  spinning and was set up in the garage.   It was a great place to spin, with lots of light.  The day was breezy though and it came right through the back door and kept blowing the fibre off the table and out to the driveway, where it rolled around like tumbleweeds until it could be retrieved.

Look at that gorgeous red/brown colour and cute facial expression.

This girl spent the afternoon eating apples from the tree.

 Carol had gotten a huge bag of processed fibre back from the mill and I had the opportunity to spin some of it for my demo.   I didn't get a photo of it, but just saying that this fibre was rejected and if it was, I was curious to know why.  The black was from an older animal, so it was a little coarser, but still it was a dream to spin.  The brown left me puzzled though as I could see no discernable reason why it wasn't deemed suitable fibre.  They were both really nice to spin and made awesome yarn.


   I met some super nice people.  I was able to spin some lovely fibre and meet some precious beasties.  It was a super fun day that I'd certainly do again.