Alpacarama

Bailey is six months old today!!  How did that happen?

His fleece is getting quite long now, and messy!  He's changed a bit since this photo was taken :-

Mum, as usual, looks on adoringly :-

. . . or was it the carrots she'd spied?

They're all going to get a bit of a shock next week though as Rob is moving both babies away from their mothers.  They're both still feeding from them, but they really don't need it any more so they're going into a separate field with Aunty Hope.  Both mothers are quite thin at the moment, so it'll give them chance to build themselves up again.  Can't imagine it'll be popular though!

The blog has been silent again for a while.  Mainly because I've had no progress to show you.  My tweed sweater is sitting untouched, and the spinning isn't finished.  That's because Tammy (who lives at the alpaca farm) received an order for 600g of fine alpaca handspun.  That's quite a lot for her to spin, so I offered to do half of it.  So far I've finished three 75g balls, and have just started the fourth.  They're working out at about 16 wpi which, I think, is classed as light fingering weight.

I need to spin some colour after this!

White Stuff

Look what we woke up to this morning :-

It was 3 or 4 inches deep in most places.  This is the first snow we've had for two years, and Bailey's first ever snow.

Apparently, this morning all the alpacas were standing around looking rather bewildered.  I don't think they could work out where the grass had gone!  By later this afternoon it was melting, but in the meantime, Tammy had been and cleared some grass for them to eat.

All the alpacas are looking pretty dirty, but Babycham (in the centre next to Hope) is absolutely filthy.  She's supposed to be white!  The cockerel wasn't too happy about getting his feet wet either :-

Tweed 3

The carding and spinning continues, well over half way now, and I've started knitting.  I trawled through patterns on Ravelry looking for a sweater or cardigan that would show off the handspun tweed, and finally came up with this one : 10 Days by Suvi Simola.  It's a top-down pattern, so that's something new for me, and has the advantage that I can just keep knitting until I've used up all the yarn.  If there's enough, it may end up as a sweater dress.  We'll see!

This is as far as I've got so far, almost to the point of separating out for the sleeves, and I've used about a quarter of the second ball of wool :-

I really like the way the tweed is turning out; I'll definitely do more in the future.  Here's a close up showing the different colours :-

The nice thing about spinning a tweed is that you can use up lots of bits of different coloured fibres that wouldn't be enough for a project otherwise.  I've got lots of those!

Tweed 2

Yesterday I managed to squeeze in a bit of time during the day to start carding the fibre for my next ply.  I've cut down on the number of passes through the drum carder to 4 rather than 6 so expect to get through this lot a bit faster.

The colours aren't quite true in this photo - the pink isn't pink at all, it's a dark mauve. Also, I decided to put some more white in with the fleck colours, just because!  I won't bore you with lots of drum carder photos this time; the mauve and white at the top went through twice, then the colours were added and they went through twice as well.  The result looked quite promising :-

Yesterday evening was spinning time!  I spun these three batts and decided I had enough to ply my first skein.

The colours in this photo are much truer than the ones above.  I really like how this is turning out.

For plying, I used my Ashford Traveller, mainly because that gives me bobbins of about 80-100g.  I wasn't sure how my ball winder would cope with larger amounts.  I'm amazed at the difference in size between the Aura bobbins and the Ashford ones.  I'd expected to be able to ply all of the smaller bobbin (above) with some of the first ply and get it onto one Ashford bobbin.  Nope!  It didn't fit.  This is what was left when I'd plyed one Ashford bobbin's-worth :-

You can hardly tell any yarn has gone from the left hand bobbin!

Anyway, the finished result (before washing) :-

I just wish I could get a better photo of the colours - this is far too pink.  It's also quite a bit thicker than I usually spin, but I must admit I didn't pay much attention to that - I wanted some texture as well as flecks so it's a bit slubby here and there.

Hope to try knitting a swatch of this as soon as it's dry, then I can decide which sweater pattern to knit with it.

Tweed Experiment

Happy New Year everyone.  Hope you all enjoyed the festivities wherever you are in the world.  Wishing you health and happiness for 2015 (and I'm sure a bit of wealth wouldn't go amiss either).

For a while now I've wanted to spin a tweed yarn, but haven't really known what to use as a base.  Then I found 500g of mauve merino that I'd been saving, mainly because I didn't really like the colour.  I ordered it from World of Wool thinking it was a nice lilac colour, but when it arrived it was actually a peculiar shade of mauve/purple.  I decided to card it with white merino and use that for the base colour.

Three passes through the drum carder gave me this :-

which was a little bit closer to the shade I expected when I bought it.

I also had a large bag of World of Wool floor sweepings (Botany lap waste) of various colours and picked these out to go into half of the mauve :-

After adding these to the drum carder, the batt looked very bright and garish, but I was fairly certain it would calm down with another couple of passes.

Fourth pass :-

Fifth pass, and the colours have almost disappeared :-

Time to add more colour to the fifth pass,

Which looked like this :-

The sixth, and final pass, gave the result I was after :-

Just enough colour showing to gave the yarn flecks when it's spun.

This is hopefully going to be a cardigan when it's finished, provided I have enough yardage.  I started spinning this on my new Majacraft Aura spinning wheel which has massive bobbins.

Tonight I spun the rest of this bobbin and then took it off and weighed it.  The full bobbin weighed an amazing 480g; an empty bobbin weighs 160g; therefore there is 320g of yarn.  I haven't finished spinning this ply yet, I still have another 140g.  So, if each ply weighs 460g, that would give me 920g of plyed yarn.  More than enough for my cardigan!

140g still to be spun

I was hoping to show you some finished yarn long before this, but it's taken forever to card this lot : 21 batts x 6 passes each = a lot of work!!  The next ply will be slightly different as I used all the red, dark blue and yellow fibre on this.  These are the colours I will use in the second ply :-

At my current rate of progress, the carding should be finished in about two weeks, so don't hold your breath!

Growing Up

. . . and learning to behave (at last)!

Bailey will be four months old on Thursday.  The time has gone so quickly.  He's now eating carrots (see pic above) - this photo looks as though the carrot was painted on afterwards, but it was just a particularly bright piece of carrot!  Cerise looks like a proud Mum watching over her boy - but actually, she's hoping he'll drop the carrot and she can pinch it!

He seems to be calming down a bit now too, and doesn't seem to be pestering the other alpacas as much, probably as a consequence of being spat at and having his ears chewed!  His face has also changed quite a bit in the last month or so.  He started off with quite a light coloured face but it must have been baby fluff because it's a lot darker now.

Before :-

After :-

Autumn Leaves

I've been meaning to try dyeing with apple leaves for a while, but in the meantime autumn crept up on me.  I think the leaves are probably better in spring, but, nothing tried, nothing gained.  And they did have some lovely colours in there

which I thought might add a bit of depth to the dye.

The leaves were boiled up for an hour or so, left overnight, and then strained.  Jenny Dean's Wild Colour says that no mordant is needed for apple leaves (probably because of the tannin content) but I wasn't quite sure I'd get a good result that way.  In the end I split the fleece (merino) into two piles, mordanted one lot with alum, and left the other natural.

The natural (no mordant) was a bit disappointing.

Not even a nice beige!

The mordanted fleece was better, with a definite yellow tinge, but still a bit disappointing.

The fleece is still wet here, just out of the dye bath, so that's why it looks a bit felted.

I decided to give the two lots of fleece a quick after dip in ammonia, so poured a glug into a bowl of water, swished it round, and then added the wool.  This worked like a dream with the mordanted fleece - it turned into a rich, acidic yellow - but the beige was still beige afterwards, just a bit darker with a few highlights.

Here are the two results once they had dried :-

The ammonia did manage to turn the unmordanted fleece a nicer colour, but it's still beige.  Nothing wrong with beige if you like that colour, and I don't dislike it, but I've got lots of beige fleece from previous dye sessions that went wrong didn't quite reach expectations.  This one will probably be over-dyed with woad, which I have to pick very soon before we get any serious frosts.

Today I started to card the yellow, and it's really looking quite good :-

You can almost see the sunshine the leaves have absorbed all summer!