Your baby alpaca shawl will be extremely soft and fine, more so than a adult alpaca shawl and much more so than a standard wool shawl. Infant alpacas are actually called crias. They are often the best part of an alpaca farmers work, watching the cria grow up over time. But it is also a time bittersweet time as the end product of an exceptional baby alpaca shawl will no longer carry the same beauty as the shavings change over to the adult fiber. No doubt alpaca fiber is much better that sheep’s wool, but the baby alpaca shawl fiber is superior even to that.

Yarn that can be used in a baby alpaca shawl can be had for roughly 9 dollars US for a 110 yard length. Common colors include dark grey, white, fawn, dark rose gray, medium rose gray, light rose gray and silver gray. Those are just the natural colors keep in mind and it is not all of the natural colors either. There are many more completely natural child alpaca colors. A lot of times with breeding it is a grand surprise as to what color combinations will come to be when a baby alpaca comes into the world.

If you are looking for a large color selection there are many farms and factories, both here in the states and in Peru that die the fibers for baby alpaca shawls so you can have pretty much any color combination you can think of.

Alpaca wool (if you will) comes in excellent variety of 52 colors naturally. Unnaturally it comes in virtually any color imaginable. Dies can make an Alpaca wool shawl a myriad of rainbow colors in Peruvian geometric patterns, shapes and lines.

If you were to talk about an Alpaca wool shawl to a true Alpaca breeder, they would probably be offended at the mention of wool being compared to Alpaca fiber. (OK, maybe I made that one up, but as an Alpaca I would be offended being referred to basically as a sheep) Alpaca wool is usually as soft as cashmere and lighter than wool would be. It has the wonderful combination of being both a strong and fine natural material. An alpaca wool shawl is approximately 3 to five times warmer than the wool of a sheep would be by weight.

Alpacas have been producing strong and warm clothing for the Peruvians for a thousand years. The facts are now though, that true Peruvian alpaca wool shawls are of a lesser quality than the ones you find woven on our own American soil. Why is that, the Alpaca fiber is such a huge business in Peru that everything is pretty much mass factory produced leading to lesser quality that the home spun local resources. I guess the bottom line is, try and source the materials for your next Alpaca wool shawl from a local Alpaca farmer and have a softer better end product.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOTcL18j6l0