Baby Alpaca yarn

The other day I washed a batch of Alpaca. The finest, snuggliest baby Alpaca, to be precise. This is the Alpaca from this local farm I wrote about a while back. The colour of the fibre is called Rose grey and is basically a light grey with beautiful brown tips. The resulting yarn has a really nice mélange of colours. The first picture shows the washed fibre - it took me 6 washes before the water was reasonably clear, washing your fibre is really quite time consuming! The second picture shows the rolags I carded on my hand carders. I mixed in some hand dyed Merino/silk, pure tussah silk, Angora fibre and hand dyed silk noil to achieve the look you can see on the yarn in the third picture. The finished yarn has been wrapped in a bouclé thread and also has big transparent rocaille glass beads spun in.

I carded some more of this Alpaca fibre with Angelina and more hand dyed Merino/silk to spin a really sweet 2ply yarn from it, but it is currently being washed, so no pictures yet. :)

Elegant grey art yarn WIP

My latest art yarn is handspun from natural grey Alpaca/Tussah silk with dark grey sequins and real freshwater pearls in matching colours. It might well be one of my most elegant yarns to date and I will soon be able to post pictures of the finished yarn. Here is what went into it:

The new knitty is up!

This morning I just had a random look at knitty and found that the Spring 2009 edition is up!
http://www.knitty.com/ISSUEspring09/index.php

To my delight there are at least two things I really want to knit. One is a lace cardigan called Decimal (I love lace cardigans, it's almost the only thing I knit and this pattern is really quite interesting) the other is Aeolian, a really stunning lace shawl. The lace shawl has been knitted from handspun yarn, and although it is a lot of yardage, I might actually spin it myself. I would do the handspun medium size, as I think it has a really nice length to it.
Decimal I could probably knit from some yarn I already have for a different cardigan.... Can't wait to start!

Some of the socks are nice too, but I still got so many other sock patterns to make.

Have you got any favourites?

Fresh from the dye pot

Some of you may know that dyeing is not my favourite part of creating, but I am always so amazed and stunned by the results (well, except for a few really fugly dye jobs in my past) that I keep going back to it. I guess it is like a bad drug, where you forget about the negative sides of it when you are on a high...
Anyway, yesterday I pulled myself together and finally did some dyeing, I think the first time since before Christmas - thank God for a well-stocked hand dyed fibre collection...

I planned on dyeing entirely different colours, but when I had the dyes so nicely mixed up into a rainbow I just couldn't say no to it. Three batches of different colours were dyed and I am very happy with the intensity I achieved this time (the colours are a little washed out above, but in real life they are really pretty).

Well, and after some dye pot show and tell on the spinner's ravelry forum I crave another dye pot. Just a quick look on a certain auction house page gave me two delightful results, so pretty soon I should be able to almost double my output, yay!

Btw, the fibres above are mainly Merino/silk but also 200g (just below 8oz) of one of my UK souvenirs, a Merino/soy mix. Trouble is, I am really having a hard time distinguishing them from another now that they are dyed! Luckily the soy has different lengths and so I already started spinning one of these rovings. :)