Spinning Kai: All Done!

See the complete series of posts on spinning Kai Llama's fiber, from fleece to yarn. 

After spinning, plying, and skeining the llama fiber, I washed the skeins gently in warm, soapy water. The thing to remember with wool, and presumably with llama, is to avoid agitation in the water and to keep the water temperature constant when moving the skeins from soapy water to rinse water. The skeins may be very gently squeezed to remove water, but must never be wrung out. As a matter of fact, if you want to make felt, you just alternate hot and cold water and agitate a lot: To keep yarn fluffy and intact, just do the opposite. 

The damp skeins are then hung up to dry. Single strand yarn must be weighted at this point to help set the twist; with plied yarn weighting isn't necessary. 

The Kai yarn looking very decorative while drying

A bunch of Kai

When dry, the skeins can be twisted with the ends tucked in. I have labeled each one with the yardage. I wanted to share some alpaca and soft wool with Danni, so I am also sending along the skeins below.

Plied alpaca on the left, very soft wool singles on the right

The llama, alpaca, and wool yarns are all boxed up, addressed, and ready to go down to the Post Office and off to Danni in Oregon. I can't tell you how relieved I am to have this project completed! Besides that, I just discovered that this will be my 1000th post on The Zees Go West--what a great feeling of accomplishment!