alpaca

Your hosts, Rob and Donna, live and work on the property and are happy to give you a tour of their ranch, where they raise alpaca and turn the animals’ fiber into yarn.

Male llamas are bred with female alpacas to increase the wool’s weight.

While llamas and alpacas can be found in every state, their populations are largely concentrated in Arizona and the Pacific Northwest.

After the Spanish took control of the Inca empire in the 1540s, Spanish rulers viewed llamas and alpacas as beasts of burden or sources of meat.

These came from large animals, such as Andean deer and wild relatives of the alpaca.

At least 50,000 families in the Andean highlands rely on herding alpaca for income and to sustain themselves.

Peruvians have been wearing knits made of alpaca fiber for centuries.

And it was fur of every variety: brushed mohair, alpaca, ponyhair, and astrakhan.

His right hand rested on his gavel, he thrust his left into the side pocket of his long alpaca coat.

One good moreen skirt did me, with a quilted alpaca for every-day wear and two white ones for best.

And black silk for Sundays, and a black merino or alpaca for week-days, made short and full, was her unvarying costume.

You may flit from brown merino to blue poplin, and from blue poplin to black alpaca, and be queen of all that is tiresome still.

I heard him trying to render the stock phrases of Low Church piety into French for the benefit of the stolid man in grey alpaca.