My Sky Alpaca Farm introduces ~ Cozy Creations By Sarah Goins

We are so excited to show you what we have been working on! We have been busy getting ready for the Holiday Market we are attending in Warrensburg, MO this week. Our daughter, Sarah, has been needle felting with our alpaca fiber. She is a full time student at UCM, majoring in Art. She is very creative!  She has handmade some really cute snowmen and brooches. She has been teaching me how to make them. I have been washing, dying, and carding the fiber we need. It's amazing, all the things you can do with this fiber! 

All Snowmen are handmade, needle felted 100% Suri Alpaca fiber!

Penguin & Tiny Top Hat Snowman

Snowman Family!

Here are some of the brooches Sarah has made. She needle felted the fiber to make the backs of the brooches.

More little snowmen!!

Aww! So Cute!

Santa Ornaments!

 

We will be working on having an Etsy shop coming soon! If you see something you like, contact us! Special orders may be placed. 

Raw or washed and hand carded light fawn Suri alpaca fiber also available for sale.  

We will be working on more handmade projects through the winter.

Learning to dye and felt our fiber

My daughter and I started hand-dying some of our fiber last weekend. We tried a couple of different methods. We used Rit and Kool Aid. I thought the Kool Aid way was easier. The colors turned out good. We are dying the fiber for some felting projects that my daughter has started. She is an artist and has started learning how to felt. She has come up with some really cute ideas. She is making snowmen with the felt.

She is also making some really pretty pins with felted backings. I have been washing and hand-dying all the fiber she needs for the project. We are going to have a booth at the annual UCM Holiday Market on Wednesday, December 1, 2010, from 4:30- 7:00pm in the Elliot Union Ballrooms, in Warrensburg, MO. So, if you would like to see some of what Sarah has made, or see some of our fiber, we would LOVE to see you there!

My mother, daughter, and I went to Columbia, MO last Saturday to The Columbia Weavers & Spinner's Guild Holiday Exhibition. We saw demonstrations of weaving, spinning, and fiber art. Also, hand-woven clothing, hand-dyed 100% Suri alpaca scarves, hats, gloves, and shawls. We had a really nice time. It really inspired us and was really nice to talk to people that work with and appreciate alpaca fiber.

I will be continuing to card the fiber I dyed, and then will be learning to make yarn using my Turkish drop spindle. Wish me luck!

We have been busy getting ready for winter, there is wood to be cut, bedding to be put down for the alpacas, some husbandry on them as well. Making sure all the animals are snuggly warm for the winter. I even string up Christmas lights in the barn during the holidays!  Our chickens have cut back on their laying since it has turned colder.
We have lots of baby kitties right now! They are so cute! The mother wasn't taking very good care of them, so we had to bring them into the house and hand feed them. They are doing much better!  

Thanksgiving is almost here,  and I have so much to be thankful for. God has truly blessed this family so much. I pray that everyone has a blessed and Happy Thanksgiving!

Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog! I will share our progress as we learn more about processing our alpaca fiber ourselves. Although we have been raising alpacas for several years, we've never done anything with their fiber. So, we have been busy washing and hand carding it, and WOW! It is beautiful! I can't believe we have waited so long! I feel that we have a lot to learn about this wonderful fiber. I feel very blessed to have our animals and the fiber they produce. I think that this is going to be great for our farm! We've had our share of setbacks over the years, and are excited about pushing forward in this newest adventure!  I'm very excited to share with you what we are doing and hopefully make lots of new friends! To be honest, I'm also new to things like blogs, facebook, etc.. so bear with me as I learn to be more technically savvy too!


With that being said, I want to welcome you to My Sky Alpaca Farm! Our farm is a mother/ daughter partnership of Sandra Botts and Lara Goins. We started raising alpacas in the fall of 2002. We were looking for a peaceful and fulfilling lifestyle, along with a healthy way to raise our children and grandchildren. Specializing in the beautiful suri alpaca. The suri, elegant and graceful, has lustrous locks that feel like silk. The fiber, once reserved for Incan Royalty, grows parallel to a suri's body hanging in long, separate, graceful locks. As a smaller farm, our animals receive personal attention, care and love. All of our alpacas are ARI registered. Our goal is to breed for the finest in quality fiber, superior conformation, and healthy crias. We are 45 minutes east of Kansas City in Concordia, Missouri.


We have been busy washing batches of our fiber with just hot water and plain Dawn dish soap. We pretty much went by a book called, "Start Spinning, Everything You Need To Know To Make Great Yarn", by Maggie Casey. The only other thing we did is we got a large salad spinner to get the excess water off of it. And watched a few online videos. My husband made an excellent big skirting table! We just lay the wet fiber on the table to dry.
We are starting out small and slow, so my mother bought a set of handcards. I was so excited when we made our first rolags! They were sooooo soft!! I also have a Turkish drop spindle. Haven't learned how to use that yet! I know we will be busy all winter working with all the fiber we have. We also decided that maybe we should start selling it. We sold some of it for the first time a couple of weeks ago! The woman who bought it is a spinner. My mother- in -law knows her and I sent some extra with her that she is going to spin for us. Very anxious to see how that turns out!

Here are our first rolags we made with Eggnog's fiber! She is a light fawn alpaca.

Here is baby alpaca fiber from one of Eggnog's crias: Washed

 Here is one of our "boys", Theoden, he is one of Cafe's crias: Washed and (below) carded.

                                                                  Faramier & Theoden

So, now we need to learn how to spin!

I love being a stay at home mom! I love being home with my children, gardening, cooking and being surrounded by animals we love! Along with our alpacas, we also have 2 big dogs, kitty's, chickens, ducks, and geese.