Yak Fiber
We'd like to share some of our yak fiber processing experience, from fiber harvesting to final products!
Here is how we collect our yak fiber, how we process it, and what fiber products we made with it:
We hand comb in the late spring and early summer to collect undercoat, and hand de-hair the guard hair and VM(vegetable matter). We don’t wash the undercoat because it felt very easily, we’ll wash it later when it becomes wet felt products or yarn.
Not every yak has the same quality undercoat worthy of the hassle to comb their wool, hours per yak. They produce undercoat by ounces and not by pounds. The manual de-hairing process requires countless hours to hand pick coarse guard hair and VM(vegetable matter) but the softness and warmth from the yak down is way worth the whole complicated process.
We prepare the wool that we’re going to blend with yak down, usually the process involve washing raw wool(with hot water), picking & carding into batt or roving. Then we choose a blending ratio to start blending yak down and wool, usually the yak/wool ratio will go down if less guard hair involved because yak down is very short staple fiber, it needs more long staple fiber to form a good strength of batt/roving to support good yarn structure. The safest ratio is 50/50 for yak/wool, but it still depends, we choose Merino or BFL as our wool source because we want to keep the softness of the yak fiber products. If you send in your yak down to a professional fiber mill, they probably can raise up to 75/25 for yak/wool. For a very experienced and skillful spinner, I believe they can hand spun 100% yak down because I already know one!
For blending we use drum carder, for 2-3 passes, you can also use hand carder or blending board as well. Then ether we use the batt/roving to spin into yarn, and knitted into something, or we just simply wet felt the fiber into a beanie, a vest, a pair of slippers, or boots. Yak undercoat felt very easily, especially when it meet warm soapy water, which is a necessary process when doing wet felting. We do wet felting much more than spinning because we feel felting can hold up structures much better than a knits, plus felt is super warm and easy to fix if wear and tear happens!
We now have some fiber mill processed yak/merino blended roving available for sale in a 50/50 blended ratio, producing a beautiful stormy gray theme. Hand combed and hand de-haired, sent to a local fiber mill to be processed into a smooth spin-ready roving! Not only does it spin beautifully, it's also suitable for making wet felt fiber products. We will have more this fall/winter when we have time to hand de-hair our spring 2026 yak fiber.
If interested in purchasing please message us via Substack, Facebook, or email us:
We’ll create a FB Marketplace listing (with integrated buyer protection, shipping, and sales tax handling) with exact ordering size for you to check out. Price is $9/oz and shipping (within USA) is around $5-$9 depends on the amount.
Thank you for your supports!
