On the page entitled ‘About alpacas’ we were speaking about fibre diameter measured in micron as well as about other fleece characteristics such as crimp, density and lustre. To many people including the new alpaca breeder this can all be very confusing. True, one of the best ways to learn is to put your hands in as many fleeces as possible so that you get used to recognising the different ‘feel’ between fleeces, but just getting to grips with the terminology and understanding what it is talking about is undeniably tricky.

Density and lustre

Initially, one of the most puzzling concepts is crimp. You will hear a lot of people refer to different styles of crimp and then further define it in terms of amplitude and frequency. It’s all very tricky to get your head around. Or is it? And what about lustre and density? Well on the whole, a dense fleece is relatively easy to recognise when you put your hands on an animal because it will always offer some resistance. Open up the fleece and if the alpaca has a crimpy fleece you should see something similar to these photos below. Each of these photos is of a fleece belonging to our animals and they show both crimp and lustre. Lustre - or shine - appears to be most obvious in the fleece on the left. This fleece is still ‘on’ the alpaca, as opposed to the other two which are shorn fleeces, and in fact this particular photo is of a cria fleece and the animal is only ten weeks old. However

closer scrutiny reveals that the one in the middle and the one on the right also display lustre although of those two, the one in the centre displays the most. You can also see that the white one is a very bright white at the end of the fleece that was next to the skin and again you will quite often hear people refer to a fleece as being bright (alpacas love to roll in dust baths so you will very often see this sort of discolouration which naturally is more noticeable on the light or white alpacas).

Crimp and staple

The crinkly effect that is so obvious in all the fleeces is the crimp and you can see that they all look a bit different - this is the crimp style which basically is determined by the amplitude and frequency of the crimp. The amplitude of the crimp is the depth of the crimp from top to bottom whereas the frequency is the number of crimps or crinkles in an inch. The naturally formed clusters or locks of fibres that can be seen throughout the fleece are known as staples. (If you would like to view these photos in a larger format so that the different styles of crimp are easier to see, simply click on the photo)