Incoming fleeces are weighed, tagged, and put in line
for the next process.
Washing each fleece to make sure dirt and oils are
removed.
Picking is done by a machine to open up the fiber, as it
tends to tangle into locks from washing or off the animal.
The dehairer removes coarse hair form Llama, Pygora,
Cashmere and other species. The deharier also removes vegetation from
fiber such as Alpaca. We target Alpaca because they have a genetic trait
to roll to fluff their coats against the cold.
Carding which is a must for all fiber and is truly the
heart of the mill. Carding parallels the fibers and it then comes off as batts
or rovings. Batts are then ready to be sent back to the customers for
felting and to handspinners. Rovings are then ready for the next step.
The next machine task is drafting which is a process
of establishing the desired size required for this particular roving.
For this we use a Pin Drafter, which accepts several rovings at once and in a
brushing action further aligns the fibers to be more parallel and reduces the
multiple rovings into a single roving of smaller size. The roving is then
sent to the spinner.
Now comes spinning, which produces single ply yarn.
We then move to the plying operation to create 2 ply or 3 ply yarn, etc.
It is then put into skeins. For skeins it is wound by a Skeinwinder, which is electronically
controlled, to give consistent sized skeins.
Yarns need to be set after spinning to stabilize the
structure of the yarn and prevent unpredictable behavior in subsequent
knitting or weaving operations. We use hot water and tension for this
purpose.
These machines are electronically controlled to give consistent sizes
and lengths.
Morning Sun