Camelid Class at BSG

I took a class at Black Sheep that lasted All day Friday. The instructor was Paula Shull, who is a long time spinner, a llama/alpaca judge, and a long time spinning teacher.

She had decided that she would not be teaching her class on "Spinning Camelid Fibers (that is, camel, llama, alpaca, guanaco and vicuna fibers) again, so she divested herself of ALL of her camelid stash - (well, except the vicuna)

She said that normally when she taught this class each student would get between 6-12 inches of any given fiber - she was giving us, sometimes, between 6 & 12 feet - roving, top, etc, and bags of raw unprocessed fiber. Wow!

My favorite was probably the baby camel - so much so that I bought 8 ounces to spin yarn to make something for my sister who "doesn't like wool" - well, this won't be wool, and it is certainly soft and non prickly - I hope that she will like it -

I put samples of every fiber in a 3x5 zip lock bag with a sample of the spun yarn that I came up with. It was fun. I would have liked to have gotten a few more tips and pointers on spinning the different fibers than she gave, but learning about all of them and how they were used (especially the camel hair!) was really fun.




This is one of those "Ready Box" type storage boxes - It is full of "sandwich size" zip lock bags full of different fibers on the bottom half and gallon sized bags of raw fiber on the top.




During the class I "half filled" a bobbin with the different samples of fibers - I decided to finish spinning "sample singles" alternating light and dark fibers throughout.




One of the "samples" that she was so generous with was grey baby alpaca top. I decided to buy another 4 ounces, filled a bobbin with just the grey and then plied it with the sampler bobbin, adding in little tufts of combed mohair in jewel colors.




You'll have to wait to see what it looks like, but here is a close up of the sampler bobbin - the pretty brown on the left side is guanaco - Oooo, nice.

I have been spinning every night in my own little Tour de' Fleece - and crocheting fingerless mitts during my lunch hour - hopefully I'll have enough to make a good showing at the Artisan Faire in September!