Alpaca Fiber Facts

Alpaca fleece is a rare, specialty fiber. The main producer of alpaca fiber today is Peru. Fashion houses in Japan and Italy are the major consumers.

Alpaca fiber is valuable due to its many desireable attributes, the most important being its fineness. Alpaca fiber is very soft to the touch and lustrous to the eye. Alpaca fiber comes in 22 natural colors which can be blended to produce even more variations. The alpacas have been raised at very high altitutes in the Andean mountains in South America, which resulted in the animals developing a fiber with microscopic air pockets to keep them warm. The air pockets will allow us to produce light-weight garments while still maintaining the thermal value. The alpaca fiber is very strong, a quality that does not diminish as it becomes finer, which makes the fiber ideal for industrial processing.

The size of the fiber hairs are measured in microns. There are several grades of alpaca, each with a specific use. Each grade is defined by a micron range. "Baby Alpaca" usually refers to a 20-23 micron range, and "Super Fine" is usually 23-26 microns. Fiber that is below 20 microns is extremely fine, and anything above 30 microns is considered coarse. For comparison, a human hair is 80-100 microns.

Alpaca is easier and less expensive to process than sheeps wool because it lacks the lanolin, and it does not need to be dehaired like cashmere. Very little fiber is lost while processing and the yield is usually 90-95%, compared to 50-75% for sheep's wool. For the hand spinner, the alpaca fiber is wonderful to work with and does not need to be washed before carding and spinning.

Alpacas are typically sheared once per year (sometimes every other year for Suri).

For more interesting fiber facts, contact the AOBA office (go to our Useful Links page) and ask for the "Alpaca - from fleece to fashion" pamphlet.