THE
RARE
YARNS
COMPANY
by Ruth & Matthew Benge
In 1987 The Kerry Express transporting
1200 alpacas and 200 llamas was finally
unloaded in Timaru after 5 years of
adventure & bureaucratic wrangling
between New Zealand and Chile. And
therein began the New Zealand leg of the
Ruth & Matthew Benges camelid journey.
Twenty eight years later the Rare
Yarns Company produces over 200
alpaca and merino hand-knitting yarns
and many contemporary designs
& patterns to support these yarns.
Rare Yarns can be seen in most up
market wool stores in New Zealand
and Australia, with some outlets in
America, Canada, Belgium, Germany
and England. These yarns are NZ &
Australian grown and produced.
Matthew sources the fibre for the yarns
and is going to briefly outline what the
growers can do to make their alpaca
fleece harvest more commercially viable.
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For us here in NZ to make alpaca
commercially viable we ultimately
need to be able to compete on the
international market. Our initial problem
is volume which is compounded by
the fact that alpaca have many lovely
colours so that once we have split the
clip into length, micron and colour our
batch size is even smaller. When we sort
alpaca into classes the ideal minimum
number would be 74 to provide a
consistent product for spinning.
We have the best wool growing system
in the world and breeders need to follow
this to become commercially viable.
Harvest: A shearing/sorting system
that does not cost $20.00+ per head
similar to second shear wool (I can
shear an alpaca in 2 minutes).
Evaluation: Select your best fleeces
by evaluating the whole fleece not a
shoulder sample. You are not selling
the shoulder sample but the whole
fleece. This system does not tell you
if the fleece goes halfway up the neck
or down onto the legs, has a bib, has
a weak back, or is britchy. It only tells
you what the sample from the best
place on the animal is like. It is not
selection but more like deception.
What is needed for a quality end
product and will make people fight
over your clip with their check
book is evenness, evenness and
evenness - of micron and length.
Everything else is secondary.
Colour: Alpaca is a lovely fibre
but it is not unique, we have wool,
cashmere, angora, mohair, camel,
yak etc. and all have their place and
attributes. Alpaca has one thing that
no other animal has, its wonderful
unique colours. I know it’s easier
to just breed white but if we lose
that wonderful colour range then
we are just another fine white fibre
competing on the market. Naturally
coloured fibres are worth more as
an end product but sell for less due
to the inefficiency of small volumes.
As the industry moves towards
white the inefficiency of colours
is compounded and their
demise becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy. Keep those colours
happening as this is what makes
alpaca unique and I believe
is the way of the future.
www.rareyarns.co.nz
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