By M. Kennedy Leavens | Executive Director
On the last GlobalGiving Bonus Day, we were asking our GlobalGiving donors to help fund our very first drum carder for our Huillloc spinning cooperative. We are excited to report that after your generous donations, we were finally able to purchase this valuable machine.
A drum carder combs raw textile fibers to make it easier to spin them into yarn. To learn more about why Awamaki’s first drum carder was such an important purchase, I sat down with our head designer and self-proclaimed “wool nerd”, Kate Mitchell.
“This is the obvious next step in our efforts to improve quality control,” explained Kate. There are two major challenges when turning natural alpaca fiber into high-quality yarn: getting the sheared fibers clean, and getting the colors consistent. The spinners have been having problems thoroughly cleaning their fibers, and some of their finished products still have bits of grass in them. Likewise, they have been having issues with color consistency too. The drum carder is helping solve these problems.
Washing the fiber in soap and warm water helps get the dirt out, but other stuff like grass has to be picked out by hand. “The drum carder combs through the fibers and makes it easier to separate out these impurities,” according to Kate.
In the below photo, you can see cardered vs. uncardered black alpaca wool fiber. Cardered fiber results in higher quality yarn because the combing aligns the fibers, making it easier to spin.
A drum carder will also allow the spinners to create more consistent colors in their yarns. In Peru, there are 52 official shades of natural alpaca. Awamaki spinners make 4 of these shades in wholesale yarn. Kate explains that the trouble is, a single alpaca may have three or four different shades of fiber in their coat. As the carder combs through the natural material, it mixes and blends fibers to create a more consistent yarn color.
This process works the same for dyed fibers. One batch of natural dye may produce several different colors on the raw fibers, as demonstrated in the photo below. When this batch is combed through the drum carder, the different shades that occur naturally will be blended together, resulting in a more consistent color throughout the resulting yarn. Additionally, we can also hand-pick different colors we choose to blend in the drum carder. This gives the women a wider color palette to work with for our yarns and finished products.
As you can see in the pictures of pink yarn, when fiber from a single alpaca is dyed at the same time in the same batch, the resulting color isn’t always even throughout the fiber. Putting this through a drum carder will blend the different shades together to produce a consistent color throughout the resulting yarn.
Our new drum carder will also save our artisans a lot of time. Kate explains that the amount of alpaca fiber that used to take an hour to clean now can be cleaned in 10 minutes. This massive time-saver allows for an increase in production, taking us one step closer to our goal of adding a line of yarns available to our wholesale customers.
We’re excited about the new drum carder, but no new change in production is without its challenges. The drum carder is currently being kept in Awamaki’s office in Ollantaytambo. We hope to soon get it out to our Huilloc cooperative where it will be much more accessible to our women artisans, but first we are working with the women to help them come up with a plan for where to keep it. It is possible that it may travel from house to house, but this is not ideal due to the size and weight of the machine. Eventually the women in Huilloc will build their own crafts center, but we are working on finding a safe, permanent home for the equipment until they have their own central space.
The Awamaki team sends a huge THANK YOU to everyone who helped us achieve our goal of purchasing a drum carder. We’re working hard to make sure the women with whom we work have the tools and training they need to make high quality products, and we appreciate your help along the way!
Links:
By M. Kennedy Leavens | Executive Director
By Kennedy Leavens | Executive Director
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
