Introducing myself...hi, I'm Hellchick!

Hello, readers! I'm really excited to be here, especially since it means talking to a new audience about alpacas.

Alpacas? Yes, alpacas.

I do a lot of things, but my main hobby for the last twenty-five years has been knitting, and that segued into spinning my own yarn about fifteen years ago when a friend taught me how to spin on a drop spindle. After she taught me how to spin, friends and family said to me, "next you'll want to process your own fleece."

"Why would I want to do that?!" I said. "That's a lot of work." And before I knew it, I'd bought my first raw fleeces to scour and process myself.

"Next you'll want to own your own your own animals for fiber," my friends and family said.

"Why would I want to do that?! That's a lot of work." And of course, here we are: I now own four alpacas that provide me with my own fleece that I clean, process, and spin by hand into my own yarns.

Making my own yarn is a craft I approach with a lot of seriousness, the way a fine furniture maker would approach their craft. I love the idea that I can take the natural, reusable resource that is animal wool and wash it, prepare it, and spin it into something I can actually wear. Something that's useful! (And by the way, did you know that alpaca fiber is 2.5 times warmer than sheep wool?)

I love talking and writing about the process of making yarn, because there's so much science and art wrapped up in it. I keep a blog about my projects at my web site, and I stream the process of making yarn regularly on Twitch (find me there at twitch.tv/hellchick).

I'd love to tell you all about how different kinds of yarn are made, so I plan to do some writing here about that. And expect to see some adorable pictures of my alpacas being adorable. I should do an introduction post just about them...