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.