Urban Alpaca Provides Fuzzy Fun
Story by Melanie Jones
Tom Sawyer is a star on the assisted living center circuit. He’s not an actor, singer or character in a play. He’s an alpaca, and if a resident can’t make it into the common room, he’ll walk right in and lower his head to the bed, ready for a pet.
Kathy Senase, owner of Urban Alpacas in Royse City, says those visits provide some of her most cherished moments. “I’m the one who is blessed when I leave,” she says. “He can turn somebody’s day around in a second when he walks in a room.”
Kathy says the alpaca, who lets her know when he needs to go outside, is just a natural with people. “He likes to give alpaca kisses, so most people he visits get a little sniff on the cheek, and that’s his little kiss.”
Tom Sawyer is one of 12 alpacas at the farm, where Kathy hosts farm tours, birthday parties, fiber classes and more. He’s the ham of the group and seems to enjoy dressing up. He has a whole wardrobe for various occasions.
“He’s a normal alpaca when he’s with the other boys, and then when he sees me back the van up by the gate, he runs over and he gets dressed up and gets in the van, and then he’s a totally different alpaca,” Kathy says. “It’s like it’s showtime, and he’s ready to go.”
Tom Sawyer also is the featured performer in the Alpacagram offering from the farm, which began during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Kathy saw that children weren’t able to have birthday parties and thought, “why not hire an Alpaca to come visit you in your front yard?” Now, alpaca lovers use Alpacagrams for Valentine’s Day, anniversaries, gender reveals, even marriage proposals.
Urban Alpacas will also send alpacas to weddings. Two alpacas will be on hand to greet guests at the celebration, then the happy couple can have their picture taken with the camelids.
Want to get the whole alpaca experience? Schedule a farm tour. Visitors get to go in with the alpaca herd, feed them apples and learn about the animals. The second part of the tour is inside the house, where visitors learn how Kathy processes the fiber and what she makes out of alpaca fiber.
Worried about the cameldids’ reputation for spitting? Well, spit happens, but you can minimize the risk. For one thing, that’s why Kathy gives guests apples to feed the alpacas. That way, if the animals do spit, it’s only apple chunks. Also, alpacas communicate by spitting, so they are more likely to spit if they feel like they’re competing for food. That’s why Kathy encourages visitors to spread out. “But when we have a huge crowd of 12 to 55 kids out here doing a field trip, someone always gets some apple spit on them,” Kathy says. “It just happens.”
Next to Tom Sawyer’s visits to skilled nursing facilities, Kathy says her favorite thing about running an alpaca farm is the artistic opportunities. She runs a craft business using alpaca fiber, and she teaches felting classes both at the farm and at Jump into Arts in McKinney.
Kathy says that after an alpaca’s fiber is cut, it’s washed, dyed bright colors and combed on a drum carder. After it’s all combed in the same direction, she uses that fiber for felting classes.
Felting, Kathy explains, uses friction with soap and hot water to make a type of fabric. There is another process called needle felting that uses long, barbed needles, “but that’s completely dangerous,” she says. “I tried it, but I had too many injuries.”
Probably the most popular class involves making felted soap. “That’s so easy, even a 4- or 5-year-old can make it,” Kathy says.
To make the felted soap, a bar of soap is placed in a nest of alpaca fiber. “It wraps around the soap, and we decorate it with color strips and then add hot water. It becomes very soapy, and with friction, it just creates a fabric around the bar. So, it’s like you have your washcloth on your soap.”
Those classes are especially popular with Girl Scout troops. Kathy says she had about 1,000 scouts come through last year to make felted soap, and they called it their camping soap. “They just had to take the soap and a towel when they went camping,” she says.
She also hosts classes to make felted scarves and felted baskets. All the alpaca fiber Kathy uses in her classes and sells at the farm store comes from her alpacas at Urban Alpacas. She also uses about 100 bags of alpaca fiber from farms up North per year to keep up with making about 100 dryer balls a week.
Raising alpacas, carding and dyeing fibers and creating functional art may be demanding work, but for Kathy, who worked in billing at AT&T for 22 years, it’s a blessing. “It’s kind of like the dream job,” she says.