Oh, the rabbit hole of looking through a social media or selling platform for just that thing that will add to your stash!
If it were for only my force of will, I would never stop scrolling, but, luckily, I have commitments and a family that will grumble if I forget to provide dinner by a certain time! That usually saves me and my wallet, as I will stop my going online and not literally buy everything! Because, I do not know about you, but I simply love the idea of possibilities that all of the stuff online would give me if I just could have all of it in my own place!
All smoke and mirrors, I know, and I will never have the million years of time needed to try everything anyway, but..well, you know, hope is the great addiction, isn’t it.
So, some time ago, in the spirit of almost-scientific research (that is a clever name for it, you can get away with a lot in the name of scientific research in my house) and dazzled by my own confused fantasies, I bought a full baby Alpaca fleece from a local farm, after seeing them on a selling platform, looking up their website and getting hooked on baby Alpacas photos (ooooohhhh, they are just sooooo cute!). You will appreciate that I had started by looking for black pencil roving and, possibly, nepps: like, 50 grams of stuff or thereabout, easy to stash in one of the drawers. I obviously did not buy any roving or nepps whatsoever.
The fact is, they let you choose among different colours, and Alpaca has so many of them that you can enjoy looking at baby Alpacas for quite a long time. I saw this rust coloured dream of a fleece and just had the most amazing daydream about giving my kids the best chair/bed spreads ever, warm, feather-weight, cozy and exactly the perfect colour to match the rest of their bedroom furniture enhancing it. (Plus, reminding us of baby Alpacas!) Then I started daydreaming about making more felt Alpaca rugs for all my friends in time, and it quickly went downhill from that.
Well, the fleece is very cheap compared to buying a woven Alpaca spread, I know because I checked, Alpaca is the new cachemire they say, so I thought that I could afford to see if I could make something acceptable out of it, although I had not experience with Alpaca or with full fleeces (albeit baby fleeces) or with felting a chair rug/bedspread. Well, I mentioned that I am a hopeful daydreamer!
The farm lady of Cold Comfort Alpaca was super kind, she answered immediately when I asked about the fleece being unwashed but not terribly soiled and with the worse dirtied parts taken off. She also gave me reassurances that the fleece was suitable for wet felting. That was about the only sensible check that I made before plunging head on into it, so I would like to point out that she was totally honest and the fleece is exactly as described. Lucky for me, as it does not smell at all, it is totally doable to keep it inside the house: I can swear it on whatever you like, because it has been living in a cardboard box in my living room ever since, so I know for sure.
(By the way, I gathered that the beginning of May is a very good time for looking for fresh baby Alpaca fleeces, if you are interested. I found them on the Cold Comfort Alpaca Store on Etsy. )
When the box arrived, I was just so excited and nervous that I had to open it straight away! And..yes! it was all I was hoping for in terms of colour and softness: my kids just wanted to dive into it and bury themselves in the rusty curly locks, and my hands just wanted to keep on gently stroking the fleece. I was totally addicted to it from the start, it was impossible not to, especially thinking about the baby Alpacas in the photos..
Well, knowing my limited time supply, I just knew that I needed to complete my wet felting in a weekend, or two maximum, or I would never get about finishing it: I will just say, yep, I was spot on on that.
I had not a very clear idea of how to accomplish my goal: it was my first rug, and of course my daydreaming severely impaired my ability to think things through properly. I now know that I should have prepared a base of mixed wool and Alpaca fibers, on which to felt the alpaca locks, whereas what I did was trying to wet felt the base of the locks together: I guess that this is a typical rookie mistake.
I spread about half the locks and fleece bits on my table, trying to keep the shading of colour naturally changing and interesting. That took me some time, and when I wetted and soaped it and started the felting process it was already a bit late, what with the kids coming to have a look every five minutes and giving their own contribution to it (ahem).
I got to rubbing the fleece lightly, afraid that I would felt in the locks too much. Then I started the rubbing. Unfortunately, my time was not enough for a long rubbing that day, and also I was afraid to felt in the locks, I wanted time to stop every now and then and check on them, but I did not have it then.
So, I thought better to stop there, wash it and put it away for further work later on: that was not such a brilliant idea, as the fleece seemed to hold together at first under the tap, but then started to show holes everywhere! Argh!
In hindsight, I should have washed it rolled up, and very delicately, as some of our expert felters suggested when I asked for help later (of course, I asked later, because that is me). Or, better, not wash it at all until properly felted, but I was not sure how soon I could go back to work on it afterwards.
Anyway, I put it to dry flat on a rack, with the whole family stealing caresses to it as soon as it was dry enough, even though I kept telling everyone (and myself) not to do it because it was already almost cobweb felt, but no way, it was sooo soft, irresistible. The kids started taking it off the rack to bury themselves into it now and again for a cuddle and I did not have heart to tell them off much: it was right addictive. Of course the holes kept growing until I had to store it away before it was more holes than fleece!
In the meantime, I understood that I needed to re-work the rug with a backing, mixing Alpaca fiber and Merino wool. So, I selected the shortest and the dirtiest bits of fleece and started hand carding them with pet brushes, to get the Alpaca fiber.
I kept on with the carding for a while, but it was slow and messy: consider that I do not have a place outside where I can make a bit of a mess, I had to work in my living room. So, I started carding it only on the evenings before my house cleaning days: it is quite incredible the amount of vegetable matter and mud (let’s leave it at that) that were coming out of just a few locks that did not seem that full of VM in the first place! I was very quickly bored to death and annoyed by the mess, with only a small light plastic bag of carded fiber to show for it!
I admit that I was pushed to cheating, at this point, and purchased a small bag of brown Alpaca fiber on WoW (it was at discounted price!), and then felt as a traitor to our baby Ruben and dubious if it would be too dark a brown for blending well with the rest. Anyway, in the end it would be just too expensive to go on buying more carded Alpaca instead of making my own with the fleece that I already have in abundance.
And here we are, as I left my project there and did not go on carding or felting Alpaca since.
That’s a real pity, as I am still dreaming about the baby Alpaca rugs that are there, waiting for me to make them real. The box with the fleece is here in my living room, looking at me reproachfully, and my husband sometimes hints at “disposing of it or at least doing something with it”, so I guess I will have to finish my UFOs sometime soon.
I learned so much already that I think that I will be able to make a better job of it as well this time around 🙂 but if you have other tips to give me, please share them in the comments, as I am surely going back to my almost-addictively-soft baby Alpaca fleece!