Alpaca Hair; An Experiment in Dirt
- ButterflyDollsBJD
- Sep 28, 2018
- 8 min read
So. Alpaca fur, or fibre, is often used as material for wigs for dolls in the bjd community, it's soft, luxurious, can grow very long, and is a natural product that is entirely renewable. This makes it a delight to use if you're environmentally minded and did I mention it's soft? It's super soft. You can style it and treat it like normal hair, you can dye it, cut, play with it and wash it(depending on the wig cap you have the hair attached to, often a hard cap). It's great versatility is very appealing.
"But it's so expensive!" I hear someone groan from the back of the internet.
It IS expensive. An MSD wig can go for upwards of $100.00 USD depending on dyes, length, style, etc. The GOOD wigs are at least.
But why is it so expensive in the first place?
Let's do a breakdown of why alpaca wigs are so expensive. I even got some photos and a shooort video to go with it this time!
Let's start with...
The Purchase
Buying Alpaca fibre is pretty straight-forward. Remember that the closer to your house the farm is, the less you'll most likely pay for shipping, so bearing that in mind I went looking. I mentioned in a previous post that Suri Alpaca fibre is the best for use in wigs for bjds because it's straight and easier to work with compared to the fibre from Huacaya
Alpacas, so that's the type of fluff I searched up.
Turns out, there's no farms that have Suri alpacas in BC, Canada. The alpaca farms I have close by in my province all carry just Huacaya alpacas. Now, that's not a bad thing, once I get into working on wigs with fluff to them, but it's not what I want to work with for a first shot at alpaca wigs. On top of that, I've seen how soft Suri fibre is and I'm itching to get my hands on it. I can't find much online for Suri farmers, so I do the next best thing:
I asked my local Huacaya seller about Suri farmers in Canada with good reputations. I want to buy from a good place who treats their fluffy animals right, and reputation is one of the good ways to do it. They directed me to this company called AlpacaLoft, a nice looking place out in Saskatchewan. I contacted Cathy there and she was very helpful when she had the time between traveling to fairs and whatnot.
It took some time to ask and for her to find out prices for me, and in the middle of September I placed an order for:
1 kilogram of White (J. Pris),
400 grams of Black (Ara),
and 30 grams of Faun (Nona).
It arrived just this past Tuesday, and I realized just how much 1 kilogram of fibre from an animal actually is....
Okay. On to step 2.
The Sorting
Sorting out alpaca that is raw is kind of......smelly. And dirty. RAW alpaca is literally just fibre sheared off the animal and packed up for you to clean u, so it's going to smell like an animal, and have bits of stuff in it. This is generally called Vegetable Matter, or VM for short.
Instead of taking on the ginormous task of dealing with the white fibre first, I decided to separate the Ara and Nona, the Black and the Faun, into lengths of Short, Medium, and Long locks.
This is what the bundle looks like outside of the bag.
Most fibre is packaged up like this when it's raw, and on hind sight I should have moved it over to my desk instead of my sewing table. I now need to clean my sewing table before I can sew anything, but that's an oops on my part.
In order to separate the fibre locks from the pile, find the tips of the locks, the thinnest parts of the locks and pull gently but steadily. Most of them will separate easily from the bunch, and you can find different lengths throughout the batch you get. It's a good idea to separate those into short, medium, and long lengths, like I've done here with the Ara.
From there, I just wrapped the individual chunks into some paper with a label to keep the lengths separated, and go clean off my desk to get set up for cleaning.
On to the next step!
The Cleaning
The next part is....time consuming, and yet so satisfying.
Get a fairly large bucket or container, I use a storage bin, and a bucket. It helps in general to have three bins, but I made do with two. Fill both about halfway with COLD or cool water, I used the coldest I was able to handle.
Using cold or cool water prevents the fibre from felting. Felting is when the fibres bunch up and become pretty much a solid lump or clump. They become pretty much unusable for wig-making if they felt, so remember this: Cold or cool water ONLY when cleaning.
Add around 4-5 Tablespoons of shampoo to the water and mix it until it's dissolved. Separate out a handful of the locks and put them into the water, sinking them into it to get them all wet. I messed up and added half of the entire bundle of long locks to the water. It was a bit of a mess with the first bunch.
Let those locks sit and soak for a while, about 10-15 minutes to get good and soaked. I used my fingers and a pair of tweezers to pull out loose bits of VM(Vegetable Matter). Once the time is up, I scooped out the locks, careful not to swirl them into a mess, and drained the water. Rinse out the locks a bit with cold running water and replace the water in the bucket with clean water and more soap.
Let the locks soak again for 10-15 minutes, then pick up the locks individually and start to gently - key word GENTLY - move the hairs apart to separate them from the lock. The motion I use is a sort of finger-and-thumb slide, just gently working the fibre out from the center, going from the cut ends(the chunky ends opposite of the tapered section you used to separate the lock from the bundle) working DOWN. You can feel the difference between the hairs if you run your fingers down the strand from the cut part to the tips, and vice versa. If you go in the wrong direction you can generally feel that the hair is slightly rougher than when you smooth it down in the right direction.
Once the lock is as clean as you can get it but don't worry overly much, you WILL miss VM. Alpaca hair is super fine, so it traps bits easily and you won't always see all of it. Get what you can and the rest can be brushed out later. Use the second bucket now with the clean water and dunk the hair locks into it. Let them soak while you work on the rest of the bunch you have in the soapy water.
Once that is done, rinse the soap remaining out of the locks in cold running water and refill the bucket with water and some conditioner. You only condition the hair once it's ready to be turned into wefts or put into a wig, if you plan to dye the hair don't condition it until after the dyeing process is done. I don't plan to dye this batch since it's dark and already gorgeous, so I went ahead and conditioned it. Mix the water around and let the conditioner dissolve, no worries if there are chunks of it floating around.
Let the cleaned locks float in the conditioner for about 5 minutes or so, less or more is up to you, then rinse the locks out again in cold water. This might take longer since conditioner tends to like staying on hair, just be patient.
From there, gently wring out the hair with your fingers and flatten the locks out on a clean, dry towel. The flatter the hair is, the faster it's going to dry. Once all of that is done, leave it to dry overnight, or if you have too much hair and not enough towels/space to put the locks to dry....
I used some twine I had to make a quick drying line once I figured out I didn't have the space for all of the long locks so...it works!
Just remember when cleaning alpaca fibre: The BIGGER the chunk of fibre you add to the bucket, the more you'll need to change the water and the harder it will be to keep the locks more or less in order while they soak, so that handful amount of locks at a time suggestion is a good one. It's best to soak the fibres in the shampoo water until the locks don't give off much or any dirt anymore, especially as you pick apart the locks to get the bigger bits of VM. The big chunk of locks I dumped in to try and clean up were a big mess and took me 4-5 soaks before I could actually work at getting the locks VM-free. There was just that much dirt.
Next up, clean up your mess, because there will be a mess, then get some sleep. You deserve it!
Morning After
It generally takes a night or both a night and day to dry out the locks completely, depending on how cold/hot it is where you live. The locks were still a tiny bit damp this morning, so I held off until after breakfast and changed them from a towel to hanging to dry before I started any brushing.
Some of the ones with elastic on them were a test I did, trying to clean a bunch of locks at once by tying an elastic around them then soaking them. It's faster than individually doing the locks but you get a ton more VM than when you pick apart the locks individually.
Apparently they both (the elastic band-cleaned and the loose locks) brush out very similarly though, so it's up to you as to your preference for cleaning them.
Starting at the blunt(cut) ends of the locks, hold them tightly about 5 centimeters down to make sure you get all of the hair tightly together. I used a pets slicker brush and an old brush to start brushing out the hairs. As with human hair when brushing, start at the tips and work your way up. The slicker brushing removes the rest of the VM, and once it's mostly brushed out you can use the normal brush to do a final run-through for neatness before you set the bundle down.
Once you finish with one, you have a bunch more to do, so feel free to bundle up some of the locks together and brush them out together, just make sure you use an elastic and a firm grip, or have a very tight grip on the locks while you brush or you can lose an entire lock in seconds since the slicker brush with grab it up and it'll essentially turn into pillow stuffing...
I lost a few grams to that while brushing today.
And speaking of loss....
Losses
You WILL lose fibre. It's just how it goes with alpaca fibre since it's so fine. Pulling out VM will lose you one or two strands at a time unless you're really careful. You'll lose weight volume while cleaning the locks since dirt is included in the purchase of the raw alpaca. You'll lose hair in rinsing the fibre locks too, a few strands here and there, sometimes a lock entirely if you're not paying attention. Brushing out the locks you'll pretty much lose whatever isn't held tightly with elastic and/or hand.
But, out of 400 grams of Ara, Black locks, I lost maybe 10 grams in total of fibre. I still have enough black fibre, just the LONG LOCKS, to make 2 wigs in MSD size, with leftovers most likely.
So in closing, this took me two days to do, just for enough alpaca to make 2 wigs. This doesn't include the making of the wig caps, or the making of the wigs itself.
What I've Learned:
Alpaca fibre isn't cheap to buy, even raw. The cleaning process isn't easy, or fast either, it's a ton of time taken to clean it, dry it and to brush it out. In total this took me closer to 26.5 hours to get just this far and I still have to do the rest of the stuff to make the wig. THEN THE REST OF FIBRE.
Shizuru will look amazing, but the wigs aren't cheap for a reason, and now I know why.
Hope this explains some stuff, I'll have more photos up in the next post, Making the WIG!
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