Llamas

Recently we went to visit my wifes family for an early Thanksgiving dinner.  There were out of towners visiting so they had a big ol' get together.  Well they live out in the country on the farm, and on this farm they have llamas.
Like this guy or gal (I didn't check):

They had over a dozen of them.  They were pretty interested to see who we were, and we were pretty interested right back at 'em.  We were in one cage with four or five of them and we were looking into another cage at these ones.  The ones in the cage we were in mostly stayed away from us, one did walk up to the little guy and he got a little scared and ran to me and wasn't followed.  These ones in the other cage were right up against it checking us out.

There were also some alpacas out there in a different pen but they stayed way in the middle.  Since the rumor is they spit we decided to stay out of firing range.  I guess they have deadly accuracy at about fifteen feet, they will hit you right in the face.  We just looked from afar at them.

The cousin harvests the wool of these llamas/alpacas and knits them in to blankets, hats, scarves, purses, rugs and whatever else she can think of.  I guess there aren't the allergies caused by llama wool that are caused by sheep wool and it is softer.  We learned about the whole process, brushing, shearing, picking, part where she sends it out, spinning, then the knitting.  We saw many of the finished products and they were all very nice.

We even saw some dog hair products.  I guess you just brush fido and you can spin it into yarn just like all the other wool and knit it.  Dog hair is hollow so it is the warmest product you can wear.  I found this very interesting, so very interesting that I want to knit a hat out of my beloved Devo now.