10 posts tagged “alpaca”
My first ever weaving project, in progress (made from Knitwitches sock yarn):
This is the next batch of black alpaca carded with purple merino. More than half of the fibre is carded now, and it's going much quicker with the drum carder than it did with hand carders :-) I've actually spun one batch of this, but I don't think I've taken any photos. It's about 5m/g, and will either stay as singles or end as two-ply, depending on what I decide to do with it. It's probably going to be another woven wrap, but at the moment everything looks like a weaving project to me, since the loom is spread across the library floor in pieces having been varnished at the weekend. I'm resisting the urge to assemble it for as long as possible, because I can't start using it for another week and a bit, so barriers are good ;-)
The grey-pink alpaca for my MiL's Christmas present is finally all spun and plied. The first picture is a closeup of two balls of singles ready for plying, and it's really just another excuse to show off the macro capabilities of my new camera! The second picture is of the finished yarn, about 500m of two-ply. I spent some time the other day swatching from my sample of this yarn, and I didn't come up with anything I liked, so this is starting to look like a weaving project as well. Of course, weaving it also means the finished item (a scarf) will be larger, since weaving uses less yarn than knitting, so this is solidifying into a plan.
My old camera died, so I'm way behind in taking photos of things, but today I bought a new one, which I chose on its ability to take closeups. So here's the last week or so's crafting...
Spinning! The alpaca (first two photos) isn't new spinning, but I took the photos to test the closeups - the second is without flash, because super macro doesn't work with forced flash, but it still shows that the picture is clear even this close up. The third picture is the plied result of the shetland-merino-silk-mohair mix, and the fourth is to be a gift for a friend. It's the hand-painted purple wool I bought at the Knitting and Stitching show, but it was so matted it wouldn't spin easily without carding it first, so it's much less variegated as yarn than it was when I bought it. I've got two more lots of fibre from the same supplier, but carding really would mess up the colours in those, so I'll have to carefully pre-draft before spinning it.
Knitting! We bought teapots on holiday in Cumbria, and now I've made a teacosy from the three-ply wisteria yarn that matches the navajo ply in my dissertation socks. It took me a day, and the top is Cat Bordhi's whirlpool toe! And I'm still knitting along on Clessidra - over halfway through both socks now.
This is my lovely new drum carder, which arrived yesterday, and which has already got through hours and hours worth of hand carding in a very short time indeed :-) I've now carded all of the lilac alpaca which is destined to be my MiL's Christmas present, and spun the first lot of it; I'm intending to spin most if not all of the rest of it this evening, and then it will be ready for washing and plying, hoorah. I've also made a start on carding the black alpaca, which will end up carded again, with the purple merino, to make goth-coloured yarn.
I was intending to make this into a wrap for me, and had originally thought of one of the beautiful spiky lace shawls I keep seeing on Ravelry, but in the same delivery from Fibrecrafts as the carder was another package, which I'm not entitled to enjoy for about six weeks: the loom R is giving me for my birthday. I've got two projects planned for this, and one of them is the gothmerino-alpaca - a nice simple rectangle of plain weaving to make the kind of wrap I like best. The other weaving project I'm planning is one I've already talked about: the autumn coloured wrap, with one ply of burgundy merino and one of variegated autumn-leaves colours. For a while I looked around for fibre in the colours I want, and then when I gave up on that, I looked around for undyed fibre and dyes to produce it myself, but then I remembered that Freyalynn (who dyed my Wisteria and Caribbean fibre) also does custom dye jobs, so my autumn leaves fibre has now been commissioned! This will be a birthday present from my parents. I believe in planning ahead in such matters :-)
And Clessidra is coming along nicely. The heel is turned, and I'm into the ankle, and am just about to take measurements and make calculations for the calf increases.
As a result of a long-held scheme, I have finally cast on for Clessidra, only a year after buying the yarn! Naturally, I'm converting the pattern to toe-up, and using Cat Bordhi's master numbers rather than the numbers in the pattern, but I am following the pattern part of the pattern, so that's alright. Although toe-up means I'm a long way from the exciting hourglass cables :-(
The yarn is purple Cherry Tree Hill, as seen in my Baudelaires, and the needles are 2.25mm Knitpicks. It's coincidence that these are the same size needles the pattern calls for - my 2.5mm Addis are otherwise occupied, 2mm is too small, and I only have 2.75mm needles in DPNs.
I'm still plotting my MiL's Christmas present - the photo to the right is a pile of alpaca rolags I've hand carded in preparation for spinning them, on the theory that I might as well card in front of the TV to encourage me to spin, and therefore possibly get the whole thing done in time for Christmas. Still, I saw her this weekend and warned her that the price of lovingly hand-crafted gifts was possible lateness ;-)
The colours in these are deliberately not mixed much - I'm carding to tidy up the fibre, not to blend colours, and I'm hoping the eventual yarn (which will be two-ply) will be gently variegated.
But I really don't like hand carding very much, so I'm forming a scheme to purchase a drum carder to make the process easier. Space in the library is, as ever, at a premium, so some book weeding and miscellaneous tidying is called for before I'll allow myself to add to the pile of crafting equipment I'm keeping.
I finished my mini-weaving project, and wove the resulting braid into a small square of meta-weaving, which I'm rather pleased with. In fact, I'm so pleased that I'm plotting a loom acquisition, or rather, scheming to get R to buy me one for my birthday. Only a little one, but I'm already plotting my first real weaving project. My excursion into buying coloured clothes this spring and summer has left me with a problem now the weather's getting colder: all my mid-layers - cardigans and wraps - are black or purple, and don't go with some shades-of-red clothes I've bought (or the others I may still buy). For a while I've been plotting to ply my burgundy merino fibre with something variegated and autumnal (as yet unpurchased), but my original plan was to knit a wrap with it. However, I'm not actually all that keen on knitted wraps, and much prefer woven ones. The loom I'm scheming for is 80cm wide, which should be plenty big enough for a nice wrap, and I'm excited about the colour possibilities in spinning hand-dyed fibre then weaving it :-)
Also afoot: plans to knit ChildHood, although probably without the hood, just because the pattern says the hood knits up large and benefits from being tried on, and there's no way that's practical. I think I'll do this with red as the main colour and orange as the contrast. This is, of course, utterly unlike anything I'd knit for myself, but that's the point of having small relatives, no? (She will be a niece, by the way; I'm knitting bright colours because I hate the tyranny of blue-for-boys-and-pink-for-girls, not because we don't know.)
The current plan for what I'll knit this into is a garter stitch seafoam scarf or shawl, although I haven't yet swatched to confirm I like the stitch, but I had such fun knitting Bellatrix (which is basically seafoam in stocking stitch), and it gives a nice open texture (also, more area for less yarn!) that it seems a good plan.
No photos of this yet, but I've also been spinning the alpaca I bought in Hay and dyed a variegated pinky-lilacy-grey. I started off spinning it as-is, but this turned out to be a pain, so I've now started carding little bits at a time (so as to avoid mixing the colours too much) and spinning the carded fibre instead, which is much easier. It's quite fine, and is going to be two-ply (it'll probably be somewhere around fingering-sport weight) and is currently intended to be a Christmas gift for my MiL, who told my partner that she was expecting 'something spectacular' from us this year after he told her about my spinning and knitting. This isn't actually a demand, so I don't mind going along with it, and the alpaca is in any case too pastelly for me, but I think she'll like it. Depending on how much yarn I produce, I'm probably thinking of a lace scarf or mini-shawl (there's 200g of fibre), although I haven't thought about patterns yet other than to decide I'm going to design it myself rather than follow someone else's pattern - I rather like the idea of telling the MiL that I dyed, carded and spun the fibre then designed and knitted the garment, all by hand. I'm such a show off ;-)
(In other family gift news, it's only just dawned on me that I should knit baby things for my BiL and his wife, who are planning to produce a neice or nephew for us in October. Note to self: research baby knits on Ravelry.)
So this is what I've been doing with the alpaca...
The first five pictures are various combinations of dyed lilac-grey alpaca and black alpaca. Sometimes carded, sometimes blended together, sometimes spun as-is.
The fourth picture has some silk noil spun in - someone from the Bucks spinning, weaving and dyeing guild at the local alpaca farm's open day gave me a little bit of this. I liked spinning the silk noil, but probably not enough to buy more.
The last two pictures relate to the sewing project I haven't yet blogged about (I'll do it after I've given the gift to its recipient). They're spun from leftover bits of sari silk - one just shredded, and the others carded; the darker one is carded with some of the black alpaca, which may well be the eventual destination of all the other bits of leftover sari fabric. I'm sufficiently pleased with the way this worked that there's a piece of drawstring cord in the finished sewing project which I spun from carded bits of leftover fabric. This is probably a bit excessive, except that I didn't have any other cord or yarn which would go, and I'm pleased that this matches perfectly
Ages ago now, I went to Hay-on-Wye with friend-R. I bought second hand books, as you do in Hay (it's a small village in Wales with dozens of second hand book shops), including some vintage knitting books. I bought them for various combinations of because they're funny and because they're useful - one has marvellous mini-stories about Little Johnny and Little Susie* and how they feel about each other, their clothes, and their mother who knit them. Another, while having deeply humourous seventies-ish fashion photography also contains what looks like good and useful advice about designing and adapting patterns, although I confess I haven't read it yet.
What I didn't expect to buy was yarn or fibre, but buy them I did!
The fibre is undyed grey alpaca, the ball of yarn is Trekking XXL sock yarn in a colourway that reminds me of starlings, and the skein is Opal Handpainted sock yarn, bought by R, and intended for socks for her (I think she wants Coriolis socks, but I'm not ready to knit them again yet). I want to use the Trekking for something for me, but I now have serious amounts of sock yarn in the stash, so I should probably get on with knitting some of it. Counting on Ravelry just now, I think I have about twelve pairsworth of sock yarn in my stash, and that's not counting the leftovers which are probably enough for at least another pair. Although I've made good progress on the purple cable cardigan recently, I'm stalled on it again, so maybe I should cast on for some socks in the meantime. The question is which...
The alpaca fibre is still somewhat in limbo, too. I dyed it with two different shades of purple cold water dye, which may have been a mistake because the colour didn't take very well, hence the pastelly shades it's turned out. I like it though, and it feels lovely. I've also supplemented it with a big bag of natural black alpaca from my local alpaca farm! Yes, I have a local alpaca farm. It's in Great Milton, about eight miles away, and their natural black actually mostly is black, unlike the natural black shetland I've spun before. I've been making various sample cards of the two alpacas, which will be the subject of another blog post soon.
*Names may be misremembered.
