yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full.......

Last Saturday I went to a local farmer's market and talked at length to the "alpaca lady". She was really sweet and gave me tons of information. AND...I walked away with three bags of unwashed alpaca-black, carmel, and white. When I got home I immediately washed a handful of each and have already spun up some of the white. I really love working with it so far--it's different than working with wool-but not too much. It just adds more fuel to the fire of my dream to have a hobby farm of my own. Or to find a single farmer. . . . . .

Well, here are the two colors I've been working on to make a couple of baby hats for the owner of Gracie, the sheep the free wool came from. I also spun up some of the natural color of the wool to knit it into stripes. Both colors were achieved with Kool-Aid--Berry Blue, and Fruit Punch with Lemonaid. Now I've started knitting-but its a struggle cuz I'm not to great at it. If I get enough knitted up I'll post that next week. I definitely prefer preparing the wool and then spinning it over actually knitting it.

Fiber Arts Friday

Well....., It all started with a craving for pickled beets. That bright ruby colored juice looked like the perfect dye for some freshly spun wool. So, after my snack, I drained the juice into my dyeing jar, and added a small skein of white wool. I figured there was enough vinegar in the juice and didn't add any more. I sent the jar and its contents through several "trips" in the microwave and waited for it to cool down. I anxiously pulled out my wool, rinsed it, and was greatly dissappointed. Zip, zero, zilch-not one teeny weenie bit of color. So, the three anonymous tablets of egg color dye that had been sitting atop the microwave got tossed into the jar with a couple of glugs of vinegar. It was an interesting shade of rusty brown til I added the half packet of fruit punch koolaid. Back into the jar for the wool and a few zaps later I rinsed my wool and got a pretty good chuckle--it came out the most beautiful color of beets!!

home made hackle

http://yarnzombie.net/Travis/?page_id=87 this link is for the site of the home made hackle. I made a much smaller version of it and didn't bother cutting off the handles-I really like it-and I've found it works great for getting the VM out of the wool. I hope to try using it to blend some fibers and use aa diz to make the pencil roving. Gotta finish the pink rolags first.

"lucky" roses

I call these roses lucky cuz it's pure luck that they even grow in my "garden". I have an area in front of my deck that has a few rose bushes, daisies, and black eyed susan's planted there by the previouse owner. I do absolutely nothing to this area-so it must thrive on neglect. Every year a couple long stem roses sprout up. I cut them and enjoy them for a few days then hang them up to dry. I have a thing for dried roses, love to hang bunches of them around the house. So these will be added to the bunch.

Another Fiber Arts Friday

This week flew by so fast-I didn't get nearly as much work done on my wool project as I would have liked. I managed to figure out how to make a home made "hackle" from something I saw on-line. Then found that my old horse hair comb works great with it. I just fluff the wool out by hand, push it down over the hackle and comb-several times--it still doesn't get everything out-but I don't have near as much hand picking, and with this pink and blue for the baby hats I want to be especially "picky". Then I just card it into rolags. I started to spin the blue-trying to make it thin for a "baby weight". yarn after plying. That's hard for me cuz I love to do lumpy bumpy art yarns. So, after this long holiday weekend I hope to have some finished yarn and maybe actually start to knit the hats. Have a safe and happy 4th!