Cinnamon Velvet: 291 yards of fine alapca and similar items

Baby Alpaca does not mean from a baby alpaca. It means soft enough for a baby, and refers to the first shearing of the season. I could go on about micron counts, but I hardly understand them myself. This is very long, fine, undyed yarn. Lightweight, spun specifically for use in a light and warm shawl. The work begins by pulling the roving from the bag - that's a fancy term for spinnable fiber- and set up at my Ashford Traveler wheel. After a few hours, there's quite a bit of single spin up nicely. But the work doesn't stop there - I then have to wind it off onto another bobbin and get ready for the next step. Plying. Plying is the process of finishing the yarn so that it will be hard to unravel, and so that it will not twist anything kit or woven out of it into spiral shapes. To ply this I set up the three filled bobbins on the Lazy Kate next to my feet, and feed the ends into the wheel once more, just like when I sit to spin. But now the wheel is turning the opposite way, so the energy built up in the fibers will hook the three singles together. The step between spinning and plying, wind-off, is critical. Yarn plied in reverse - which is to say, from the end I stopped at - will misbehave more while plying, and as it's worked later. It may also have thick or thin spots. Wind-off is the process of transferring all that mass of yarn onto another bobbin, so that the end I began spinning it from will be the end on the outside, the one I feed into the wheel to begin the ply. In the process of winding off, over-energized spots relax and slack spots take up the extra, so the yarn is smoother all around. Once it’s plied, I transfer it into a skein, tie up that skein, and soak it in boiling water for ten minutes to set the twist in place. I then hang it somewhere with a weight at the bottom and let it dry. A few days later, I wind it into a ball, measure the yards, and consider it ready for sale or use. A whole day can be spent doing nothing but this and pausing to eat. With my yarn, you know you’ve got something professionally made, with care in every step. In the case of this fine alpaca, each skein took four days between when I sat down at the wheel to when I finsihed plying and measuring.