The trip through to Knoxville for the Tennessee Valley Handspinners Guild meeting went smoothly. Anne came with me as she wanted to catch up with her youngest brother and his family while I was at the meeting. We followed the usual routine of picking up some breakfast from Panera for the road and made it in plenty of time for the meeting at 10.
I had carded the washed alpaca with a plan to produce a sample of 3-ply yarn.
The locks were picked open a little by hand before running through the drum carder. Then the resulting batt was run through two further times to tidy up the fibers.
I split the final batt into three roughly even amounts and spun each to a bobbin and then put the three together to create the 3-ply DK weight yarn.
The next step is to clean and wash larger batches and get into the real spinning task.
While at the meeting I compared my washed East Friesian locks with some another guild member had washed and she encountered the same problems as I did. Given the fairly high dirt and vegetable matter content this wool will never be super white when clean. As two-thirds of mine will be dyed anyway I’m not too worried.