My use of alpaca to date has been as a yarn for texture. I like to do this as it takes up natural dyes slightly differently than wool adding both texture and shades simultaneously. You can see this in the madder dyed piece below , where the alpaca yarn is at the top and slightly lighter than the surrounding wool
I was therefore interested to see how the fibre itself felted during a day this week at Artybird in Carnforth. The fibre I had to felt was one year old alpaca , the youngest and softest .
It has less scales and less crimp than wool fibre. Perhaps it would be very hard to felt.
With four thin layers laid out I just used my normal techniques and only cold water and found I could easily and quickly make a small sample. I had embellished the piece with a small amout of darker shades is alpaca and they were well connected. This piece is light and strong and slightly hairy.
I tried again , using finer lines of the darker fibres and adding some cords. Again easily felted , but overall not as pleasing as my first piece , the dark cord really detracts from the rest of the composition.
I am encouraged to seek out the alpaca fibres I have in my stash and test them out , and I think I am going to try a bit of solar dyeing with some onion and pomegranate on my window sill on these two samples.
