It has been many years since we’ve seen any Vicuña yarn at TNNA. The vicuña is one of two wild camelids in South America, related to the alpaca. It is said that Vicuña fiber is the softest and silkiest in the world, and I cannot disagree. It is also very warm, which is of course how the Vicuñas survive in the Andes.

Read more about these amazing animals here.

The fiber itself is very rare– there are not many animals, they are wild and have to be gently caught to be sheared. The fiber itself has to be manually picked over to remove the guard hairs, which is very labor intensive.

Naturally, this means that Vicuña yarn is quite expensive, and we were quite surprised to see some available.