Big Rock Alpaca Farm

MAPACA Jubilee is coming up April 8-10, 2011.  This is the 15th year of celebrating the jubilee with alpaca, fiber and fun.  The schedule is packed full of activities for everyone.

One of the new features we like this year is the MAPACA Member store.  It’s an area designated for farms to consign products made with fiber from their own herds.  This will be the debut of our Handspun ROX yarn.  This is the yarn created through our hand spinning offer.  We have been getting beautiful yarn back from hand spinners across North America.

After MAPACA the yarn will be available at our online shop and other events that Big Rock Alpaca Farm does.

Here are a couple shots of the hand spun yarn we will be offering at MAPACA.

Tags: Events, Hand Spinning, Store by Allen
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Right on the tail of PAOBA Breeder’s Showcase 2010 we had shearing day.  We again went to Paso Ligero for shearing.  Kim from Paso Ligero is wonderful.  Since we don’t have a trailer she again this year came and got all of our animals and transported them to her place for shearing.  We couldn’t ask for a better neighbor.

It was a long day.  We started shortly after 7:00 AM since we had almost 50 alpacas to shear and the guys doing the shearing were going to another neighboring farm to shear after we were done.  Ian from Big Mount Alpacas had enough animals at his farm this year to have them coming there, instead of him bringing all his alpacas to Kim’s place.

We got lots of great fiber off some wonderful animals.  The shearers did a good job again this year.  I don’t think I’ve seen him yet knick an animal.  I can’t say that for myself, I hit some blood on a couple toenails, but not many.

We now have 12 more blankets and 12 more seconds bags of wonderful alpaca fiber here to work with.  If you are interested we could still use some more hand spinners for spinning the fiber.

All of our short cuts, leg fiber and other waste is being sent to help clean up the oil spill in the Gulf.  Isn’t alpaca fiber wonderful!

Alpaca shearing

Tags: Events, Hand Spinning by Allen
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Information on the hand spinning offer has been moved to its own page.

Are you a hand spinner that loves trying different things? Hand spinning with different blends of fiber? Maybe hand spinning some hand dyed fiber to see how it turns out?

Hand spinning wheel

We would like to see how our alpaca fiber blends with other fibers and how it dyes. We just don’t have the time to do the hand spinning to use up our fiber. We could send it out to get processed, as we’ve done in the past, but we’d like to see some more variety.  Even getting it processed at a mini mill means we’d get 4+ pounds of the same thing.  We’d like to get 3 or 4 skeins of something unique.  We may either sell it in our shop, online or in person, or use it in a craft.

What we would like to do is find a couple hand spinners willing to spin up the fiber into yarn for half of the fiber. How it would work is we’ll wash, card and blend the fiber into bats on our Howard Brush Drum Carder.  We’ll send you half of the fiber blend to spin for us and after you send it back we’ll send you the other half with which you can do whatever you like.

This is something new, for us, that we’re trying so we’re open to working with your ideas if your willing to the work with us and give us suggestions.

If this is something you think you would be interested in please let us know:

Tags: Hand Spinning, Products, Store by Allen
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