Thoughts on fiber: Alpaca

Yup, I got tired of coming up with cute titles for these.  Blame the children... they have been throwing up on me all weekend, and I am exhausted!

Alpaca is currently a very popular fiber.  This is understandable, as alpaca is (generally speaking) delightful to work with.  It is soft and smooth.  If you like natural colors, alpaca can be your friend, as the beasties come in about fifteen kajillion different colors.

The downside of alpaca is it has absolutely no memory.  Seriously, look at South American fashions from back in the day... see any ribbing?  Cables?  Nope, not a chance.  Ribbing done in alpaca just sort of sags out of shape, and doesn't do any of the things ribbing is supposed to do, except maybe look cute.  Even for lace, many knitters complain that 100% alpaca is too saggy to properly show the pattern.  Of course, this isn't necessarily a BAD thing... you just have to figure out how to use it.  One of the easiest ways is to just mix your alpaca with a nice, springy wool, like merino.  That makes you loose some of the unique alpaca qualities though.  My advice is simply to choose your patterns very carefully.  Crochet edgings can lend your work support.  Make something that's supposed to be soft and drapey, and it will work just fine!

The other big deal with alpaca is that it is supposedly hypoallergenic.  This is true, but not the way most people think it is.  Hypoallergenic simply means that something is less likely to cause an allergic reaction than similar substances, not that it's impossible to be allergic to it.  Believe me, you can be allergic to alpaca!  It is simply less common than wool allergies.  In addition, alpaca contains no lanolin, which eliminates lanolin allergies entirely.  So if you're allergic to wool, it is certainly worth a try.  But don't pin all your hopes and dreams on it.

Thoughts on fiber

I've noticed that a lot of people tend to have one go to, fail safe fiber.  For most, this is either wool or acrylic.  I've been thinking about that lately, and am slowly coming to the conclusion that it is because, as fiber artists, we simply have too many choices.  I mean, there was a time when you were pretty much limited to your flock, and maybe your neighbor's flock.  No more.  Now you can get alpaca, six kinds of wool, silk, a couple kinds of cotton, acrylic, nylon, a few flavors of rayon... just by going to your local yarn store, or even closer, the internet.  This is a good thing.  But it is difficult to know or predict how each of these fibers will behave, alone or in blends, so we tend to have a go to.

And it is true that a good wool yarn can be made to do just about anything, as can acrylic if you know what you're doing.  But it might not be the best answer.  So I've decided that I'm going to do some posts on fiber types.  Because once you know the basics, it becomes so much easier to get the effect that you want.  Now, it is of course possible to just always get the same yarn (or a comparable blend) as the designer used to make their pattern.  I encourage this, frankly, however it's not always going to be what you want to do.  Sometimes the recommended yarn is unavailable.  Sometimes it's too expensive.  And sometimes you just want a bit of a different effect than the designer got.  All perfectly valid reasons for a substitution... and if you know your fiber, there will be fewer unpleasant surprises along the way.