The Advantages of Alpaca for Textile Manufacturing

For textile manufacturers, fleece yield and cost per animal are relatively insignificant. What matters is the total amount of fleece that ultimately is collected for processing. Nonetheless, the product is usually divided into different price categories. The greatest influence on the price paid per kilogram of fleece is the fineness of the fiber. There are several reasons for this. On the one hand, a fiber with a smaller diameter generally feels better on the skin. The prickliness – the point at which the fleece or wool feels scratchy – is further away. For the producer, a finer fiber also means that the spun yarns are much lighter and narrower.

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To manufacture a yarn, approximately 35 fibers are needed at any given point along the thread to ensure the yarn has sufficient stability and does not fall apart. The spun fibers are twisted together in the yarn and, especially in combed yarns, lie very neatly and parallel to each other. In fine yarns, this is hard to discern with the naked eye, as the individual fibers merge into the yarn. A good example for visualizing yarn structure is a thin electrical cable. If you cut it crosswise, you can clearly see individual wires that are twisted together. The essential difference is that the wires in an electrical cable are longer and coarser than the individual fibers of yarn. Moreover, the wires are not very strongly “spun” together since they are more malleable.

This metric has not been established in the sale of wool; Tex is mainly an important figure in the industry. Nevertheless, it is easy to calculate even in a local wool shop. Baby alpaca wool is usually sold in balls of 50 grams with a running length of approximately 100 meters. Ten balls thus yield a running length of 1000 meters, which corresponds to a weight of 500 grams (10 x 50 g). The selected wool therefore has 500 Tex. For a yarn, this is not a particularly fine value at first glance. But why is that?

The commercially available alpaca wool is not a single yarn. Instead, it consists of several twisted single yarns. The wool mentioned here is four-fold twisted. When considering the Tex value of the individual yarns, a much finer picture emerges – each yarn only contributes a quarter of the overall value. The wool thus consists of 4 x 125 Tex.

Alternatively, in practice, especially with knitting wool, another specification is typically provided in the product description. The unit Nm (number-metric) is common in commercially available wool and works on the inverse principle of Tex. The Nm strength indicates the length of yarn that corresponds to one gram. The 500-Tex wool from the example above corresponds to 2 Nm. If 500 grams are reached only at 1000 meters, then 1 gram of weight is reached at a length of two meters. Accordingly, the knitting wool would have a strength of 2 Nm (1000/500). Here too, since the wool consists of four twisted yarns, it is indicated as 8/4 Nm. In essence, it consists of four yarns, each with 8 Nm. It should be noted that while a lower Tex value indicates finer wool, a lower Nm value essentially describes coarser wool.

Excerpt: LEIDENSCHAFT ALPAKA – HUSBANDRY, BREEDING & SHOWS Publisher and Author, Show Judge Robin Näsemann, 2020