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:

Alpacas in Switzerland

Alpacas in Switzerland
Originally uploaded by snowberrylime

Currently I am spending a prolonged weekend at my parents' place in Switzerland. Of course I also used the opportunity to stop by my local Alpaca farm and get myself some wool!

I also just heard that they are one of the biggest Alpaca farms in Europe, which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy... they are all so cute and the owners are always really nice. :)

Check them out here: http://www.alpacas-of-switzerland.com
It's the place where I get all my unprocessed Alpaca from, and judging from the choice I got this time, I assume there will be loads of hand processed Alpaca in my shop in the near-ish future. It all takes quite a bit of time, but creating a yarn from absolutely scratch is just a great feeling and I hope that whoever knits with these yarns or uses them in another way will feel it as well. :)

The picture below is of a cutie which just looks like a giraffe, I would have taken that one home immediately!

Awwwww..... and this one was still a baby in grey/rosewood brown and it was so shy! It barely dared looking around the tree.... :D