Do camels get a spa day?

I have been doing a fair amount of knitting lately and have begun thinking about non-acrylic yarns. For years I've been too cheap to work with most natural fibers, including even basic wools like the stuff that comes from sheep. Among other things, acrylic yarns are easily cleaned. When I knit stuff like afghans for infants or sweaters and mittens for kids, I want the garment to be machine washable. I might fondle the wool yarns in the store, but I'm usually unlikely to actually buy it. Some of it is basic cheapness -- if a sweater takes five large skeins of yarn to make, and each of those skeins is a natural fiber, a person can easily drop $100 just on yarn. Then when you add in the possibility that the resulting sweater would be one that shrinks to Barbie size and turns into felt if the owner foolishly throws it into a washing machine. . . acrylic seems like the logical choice for most of my projects. 

This winter, though, I've been doing small stuff. Socks. I am actually working with a sock yarn that's got a high wool content. Not a cheap yarn, by my standards, but one pair of socks doesn't actually require much yarn. Then a few weeks ago there was a discussion online among several virtual friends about hemp and hemp fiber. I did some musing about hemp yarn. I've never seen any, but have seen hemp cloth. I have a tee-shirt made from hemp that is lasting forever. The Michigan Tech chapter of NORML sold them back during one of the years I taught at Michigan's Toughest University, which means the shirt is now probably 25 years old. It still looks good. 

Anyway, I figured if a hemp tee-shirt was that durable, hemp yarn would probably stand up to a lot of abuse, too. It would probably make decent socks. So I went looking online for hemp yarn. Turns out there's a lot of it out there. Multiple companies have figured out industrial hemp can yield decent fiber. The hemp plant, the stuff planted in fields that makes it obvious hemp grown for fiber is actually pretty much of shrub, has two layers in the stem.One layer makes good fiber for weaving; the other layer is good for things like paper. Given that hemp is processed in a way similar to flax (source of linen), just on a bigger scale,  one has to assume it didn't take entrepreneurs long to find equipment and start processing hemp again.  So, lots of hemp yarn in a variety of weights/wraps/plies -- there are multiple ways of defining yarn. I'm happily comparing hemp yarns when suddenly a suggestion for something slightly different comes up.

Camel. 

Camel? Somehow I've never thought of camel as a fiber for knitting. Granted, there are things referred to as camel hair coats but it never occurred to me they might be made from actual camel hair.

The push for the camel hair yarn described it as being carefully obtained from Bactrian camels in Mongolia. The hair comes from combing the camels once a year, not shearing them, and is available in two natural colors: a tannish brown and a brownish gray. The price per skein is reasonable. I'm intrigued, but I was having trouble imagining the weight and feel of the yarn. I don't think of camels as having much in the way of hair. When I visualize a camel, it's always a dromedary, the one-humped Arabian camel, the ones zoos have for camel rides for kids. They've never struck me as having much in the way of hair -- they seem to have a fairly short coat. 

So I consulted my sister, the fiber expert. She has llamas, she spins, she weaves, she knows lot of people who mess around with various fibers. And llamas are distant relatives of camels. It turns out she does have experience with camel hair, but has never actually seen commercially produced camel hair yarn. She did a fiber arts project with kids once that involved hair from a camel ride camel. The camel hair was used to demonstrate felting. She said the kids had fun, but the hair was super dirty so things got kind of muddy. 

This raises an interesting question. Do they bathe the camels before they comb them? You know, do the Mongolian camel herders set up a day spa for the Bactrian camels and do the equivalent of a shampoo and blow dry before doing a comb out to get the hair? Or do they wash the mud off afterwards? And how dirty would the camels be when much of Mongolia is desert? Shouldn't the sand just shake out? It would be nice if the camels actually did get a spa day where they got to hang out, gossip over drinks, and get a nice massage and a pedicure in addition to the comb out. Nerf tells me that combing is a plus; it means they'd be getting the soft undercoat and not the much stiffer guard hairs.

Bactrian camels do have a lot of hair. They're much shaggier looking than dromedaries. It might be a really strong yarn. It could also be both fine and soft. According to Google, which as we all know is never wrong, some fibers that get marketed as cashmere are actually camel and not kashmiri goat. That makes the idea of buying camel hair yarn rather tempting.

On the other hand, the incredibly irritating hair shirts medieval monks and other religious ascetics wore as an act of penance were made from camel hair, so who knows?