The very soft knits are the ones people are most nervous about and most likely to ruin, and usually by being too careful rather than too careless. A jumper that sheds on a dark coat gets washed, because shedding looks like a fault. It comes out longer than it went in, flatter than it went in, and shedding just as much. Nothing about that sequence is bad luck. These fibres are built differently from sheep’s wool, and almost every instinct carried over from ordinary wool care points the wrong way when applied to them.
A fibre built differently from sheep’s wool
Sheep’s wool is heavily crimped, covered in prominent scales, and springy. Alpaca has very little crimp, a far smoother surface with fewer and flatter scales, and many alpaca fibres are hollow or partly hollow down the middle. Mohair, from the angora goat, is smoother still and has a distinct sheen because of it. These are not small differences in degree. They change how the fibre behaves at every stage.
The hollow core is why alpaca is so warm for its weight. Still air is an excellent insulator, and a fibre with air inside it carries insulation that a solid fibre has to build from loft alone. It is also why these knits feel cool and fluid rather than bouncy. Where a wool jumper springs back when you squeeze it, an alpaca one settles.
The lack of crimp is where the trouble starts. Crimp is what gives wool its memory, the tendency to return to a shape after being pulled. With very little crimp, alpaca has very little memory, so a garment that is stretched tends to stay stretched. Hang a wet one on a hanger and it will grow measurably down the length of the body and never come back on its own.
The flatter scales cut both ways. They mean these fibres felt far less readily than sheep’s wool, which is genuinely good news in a wash. They also mean the fibres grip each other less, so a yarn spun from them holds together largely by twist alone.
Why it sheds and when it stops
Shedding is not damage and it is not poor quality, though it gets blamed on both. A soft yarn is spun with low twist, because twist is what makes a yarn feel firm and these fibres are chosen for the opposite quality. Low twist means a loose grip on each individual fibre, and the shorter fibres in the mix are held by almost nothing. Ordinary movement works them out.
The fleece also contains two kinds of fibre. The fine undercoat is what the garment is sold for, and mixed into it are coarser, straighter guard hairs. Guard hairs are stiffer, sit less comfortably in the twist and migrate outward, which is why what comes off a new jumper is often slightly coarser than what the garment feels like. Better preparation removes more of them, but no preparation removes all.
It settles down. A new garment sheds most in the first handful of wears as the loose material works its way out, and then tails off. What speeds that along is not washing, it is a gentle shake outdoors and a light going-over with a soft brush or a lint roller before wearing, which takes the loose fibre off in one go rather than leaving it to come off against a coat.
Cold helps, oddly enough. A piece of alpaca knitwear left somewhere cool for a few hours before its first wearing sheds noticeably less, because the fibres are less mobile at low temperature and static builds far more slowly in cold fabric. It is a small trick and it makes the difference between a dark coat that needs brushing afterwards and one that does not.
Matting is friction, not felting
Sheep’s wool felts because its scales lift in warm water and lock into each other permanently. With flatter scales, alpaca and mohair do not do this nearly as readily, which is why a soft knit that goes through a warm wash usually does not shrink dramatically the way a lambswool jumper will. What happens instead is matting, and the two get confused constantly.
Matting is a surface tangle. The long, loose fibres that stand out from the yarn, the halo that makes these knits look soft, get rubbed against each other at points of pressure until they knot together into a dense, flat patch. Under the arms, at the inside of the elbow, wherever a bag strap sits. The fabric has not shrunk and the stitches are unchanged. The surface has simply compacted.
Because nothing has interlocked chemically, matting can largely be undone, which is not true of felting. Steam held above the patch relaxes the fibres, and then a fine comb or a soft brush worked slowly through the surface separates them again. Work outward from the edge of the patch rather than attacking the middle, and stop when the halo lifts rather than trying to reach the original state.
Airing instead of washing
The smooth fibre surface that causes shedding does one very useful thing. Soil and odour have little to hold on to, so they sit on the surface rather than working into the fibre, and both leave with moving air. A garment hung overnight somewhere with a draught through it comes back noticeably fresher, and the effect is stronger with these fibres than with sheep’s wool because the surface is less textured.
So the right routine is to air after every wearing and wash only when something has actually happened to the garment. Twice through a cold season is a reasonable expectation for a jumper worn over other clothes. Every wash takes a little of the halo with it, because water and handling compact the surface, and that softness is the whole reason for owning the thing.
Spot cleaning handles most of the rest. Dab with a barely damp cloth, working from the outside of the mark inward so the soil is not carried further out into clean fabric, and let the area dry flat before touching it again. Do not rub. Rubbing a soft knit is how a small mark becomes a permanent matted patch.
Steam is the other tool worth having, and it is the one most people never think to use on alpaca knitwear. Hanging a garment in a bathroom with steam in the air relaxes the creases, lets the fibres that have been pressed flat stand up again, and freshens the fabric without ever wetting it through. Give it a shake afterwards and let it dry before it goes back on a shelf.
Washing and drying when it is unavoidable
Cool water, a detergent made for delicate fibres, and no agitation whatsoever. Submerge the garment, press it gently under a few times, and leave it to soak. Then lift it out supported from underneath with both hands, because a saturated knit with little fibre memory will stretch under its own weight and hold the new length. Never lift one by the shoulders.
Get the water out by pressing rather than wringing. Lay the garment flat on a towel, roll the two together, and press down along the roll. Repeat with a dry towel. A twisted soft knit does not spring back the way wool does, so a wrung garment often keeps the distortion in the fabric permanently.
Measure before you wash and reshape to those measurements while damp. Length of body, width at the chest, length of sleeve, written on a scrap of paper. Then dry flat on a towel away from any heat, easing the garment back to its numbers before you leave it. This is the single step that separates a garment that survives many years from one that grows an inch each wash.
Store folded, never hung. A hanger puts the whole weight of the garment on the shoulders, and with no crimp to resist it, the fabric creeps downward over months. Folded flat on a shelf, with nothing heavy stacked on top, it holds its shape indefinitely.
Soft knits through a Gaithersburg winter
Gaithersburg swings between damp spells and cold, dry air through the colder months, and soft knits notice both. Moisture makes these fibres slacker and more willing to be pushed around, so a garment worn on a wet day picks up folds it would have shrugged off in dry weather. Airing it in a warm room rather than a cold one lets that moisture go and lets the fabric settle.
Dry, cold air brings static, and static is the usual reason shedding seems to get worse in midwinter. A charged fibre is attracted to anything uncharged nearby, so the loose material in the yarn leaves the garment for a coat sleeve or a scarf far more willingly than it would in damper weather. The garment itself is no worse than it was a month earlier. It is simply losing to the coat what it would otherwise have held on to.
Indoor heating is the other thing worth naming. A garment stored in a warm cupboard through the season dries out more than it would in a cool room, and a very dry fibre is more brittle at the points where it bends. A cool, dark shelf is a better place for soft knitwear than a heated airing cupboard, and it is better again if there is a little air moving through.
For everything else in the wash
Soft knits are best handled by hand, but the rest of a cold weather wardrobe is ordinary laundry with a lot more bulk in it. Coats, throws, heavy blankets and the bedding that comes out as the temperature drops all need a drum that can hold them loose enough for water to move through.
The machines at our self-service laundry on Muddy Branch Road take the bulky things a home machine cannot, and having the heavy items dealt with elsewhere leaves the sink free for the two or three garments that genuinely want doing by hand at the end of the season.
Our machines and the store are cleaned daily.
Our wash-dry-fold service covers the everyday laundry.
For general guidance, The American Cleaning Institute publishes a fabric care guide that is a useful cross-check.
The short version
Alpaca and mohair have smooth, low-crimp fibres, which means they shed, they hold very little shape memory, and they release odour and surface soil readily to moving air. Air after wearing and wash rarely. When a wash is due, soak cool without agitation, support the garment out of the water, press it dry in a towel, and reshape it flat to measurements taken beforehand. Store folded rather than hung.
WaveMAX Gaithersburg is at 215 Muddy Branch Rd, easy to reach from Gaithersburg and the surrounding area. If you have a load that will not fit at home, call us at 240-477-4467.