Black Regal Alpacas is at Mulgoa, on the western edge of Sydney between Penrith and the Blue Mountains. We breed alpacas, mainly black ones, and we sell the fibre they grow.
What we actually sell
Three things come off this farm and go out to makers.
Raw fleece, $40 a 1kg bag plus postage. Skirted but unwashed, in natural black, brown, fawn and white. You scour and prepare it yourself.
Carded bumps, 200g, scoured and carded at an Australian mill and ready to spin.
Mill spun yarn, 100g skeins in 4 ply and 8 ply, undyed.
All of it comes off our own animals here. None of it is blended with fibre from anywhere else. That is a plain factual statement rather than a marketing one, and it is the reason we can tell you what you are getting.
The bit we are careful about
Our socks, hats, jumpers, scarves and throws are not made from our herd's fibre. They are made from genuine Peruvian alpaca, where the manufacturing expertise for finished garments has been built over generations, and a couple of the sock lines are made in Australia by Humphrey Law.
We say that on every product page. A farm this size cannot produce commercial knitwear, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The farm fibre goes to hand spinners, which is a far better use for it.
Why buy from a farm rather than a shop
Two honest reasons and one that people expect us to give but we will not.
Traceability. We know which animals the fibre came off and what sort of season they had. If something in a bag is not right we can tell you why, which a reseller two steps removed cannot.
Colour you cannot easily buy. Natural black is genuinely hard to source undyed in Australia in any quantity. Our herd is bred for dark fibre, so it is what we have most of. Fawn and brown are common enough. Black is not.
The reason we will not give is price. Buying direct is not automatically cheaper. Sometimes it is, sometimes it is not, and anyone who leads with that argument is usually clearing stock.
Where Mulgoa is
Mulgoa sits south of Penrith in western Sydney, on the way to Warragamba. It is about an hour from the CBD, forty minutes from Parramatta and twenty minutes off the M4.
That matters because there are not many alpaca herds this close to Sydney, and it puts us in reach of the spinning and weaving groups across the basin, from the Hawkesbury down to the Illawarra.
Groups and guilds
If you belong to a spinning, weaving or felting group anywhere in the Sydney basin, we would like to hear from you. We are happy to host a group here, or to come to a meeting with fleece so people can handle black, brown, fawn and white side by side and see the difference in the hand.
No charge and nothing to buy. Groups are usually short of programme content and we are usually happy to talk about fibre, so it tends to suit both sides.
Postage
Everything ships across Australia and postage is calculated at checkout on the weight of your order. Fleece is bulky rather than heavy, so a kilo posts more cheaply than people expect.
Questions about micron, staple length, colour or preparation are welcome and we answer them ourselves rather than passing them to someone else.
See also: choosing alpaca fleece for hand spinning, how to wash raw fleece and raw fleece, carded bump or yarn.