Fiber

There are no perfect alpacas. There is great room for improvement in all of our herds, and we can watch it happen before our eyes in our very own pastures, when we make good breeding choices. Once you learn to judge alpaca conformation and fleece, you'll see that not even blue ribbon winners are perfect. Learning to evaluate fleece will help you to make the best breeding choices for your alpacas. more »

The only way to know what quality fleece your alpacas are producing is to have it professionally tested. There are several wool testing services available (this is sheep country after all!). There seems to be quite a range of charges too! Whichever service you choose, you should be supplied with a “histogram” for each individual alpaca sampled as well as a summary sheet listing all your results. A good testing service will also help you to understand your histogram if you require it. more »

Fibre testing can be like an ambush for the unwary. There is much misinformation as to what fibre test results mean and how they should be applied. The following is a short guide to help dispel some of these fibre testing myths. more »

From the sample supplied to the testing laboratory, 2000 fibres are measured and then processed to obtain, mean (average) fibre diameter, standard deviation, co-efficient of variation, histograms comfort factor, coarse edge measurement, curve, curve standard deviation, and spinning fineness. more »

Alpaca fibre has low crimp and smooth fibre surface. This makes the fibre difficult to process, particularly in sliver/fibre transferring and delivering processes. Blending with wool enhances the alpaca fibre processibility, makes the fibre more easily processed on modern wool processing facilities, and allows the development of new products. To evaluate the effect of wool fibre properties, especially wool crimp, on alpaca/wool blends, two alpaca fibre lots were processed to tops then blended with three commercial wool tops via top gillings. Yarns and knitted fabrics were subsequently engineered with identical machine settings. The performance of alpaca/wool blend slivers, yarns and fabrics has been investigated in this paper. more »