Alpaca – Page 2 – Yarn, Books & Roses

My spinning wheel has been sitting around feeling bored. Actually, it has been moping and sulking in a corner of my office for months now. (I only dropped it that one time. Really. Only a few parts popped off. I totally think that it has been over-reacting about the whole thing…) Hoping to score some fabulous fiber that I could use to tease it back into good humor I headed off to THE YEAR’S BIG EVENT: the Estes Park Wool Market which is held every year in the mountains of Colorado in Estes Park, a wonderful mountain town near Rocky Mountain National Park. I have a lot of yarn in my stash. The wool market is where I find those special yarns and fibers that I can’t easily obtain and petting the animals that produce them is a special bonus!

I planned my outing for early Saturday so that I could arrive in the cool of the morning with the plan of racing through all the vendors, visiting the animals and then shopping for fiber. Thunderstorms are a given this time of year so I wanted to get out of the mountains before 3pm. It was a plan, anyway.

Alpaca — Isn’t this alpaca a great color? He’s not his usual fluff muffin self as his fiber has already been clipped off.

Alpaca fleece — Yep. You guessed it. I have acquired a fleece from one of the animals grown locally. The fleece has several colors in it from cream to dark caramel and is really clean. This fleece is so nice I had to get it into the car fast to protect it from my fellow fiber addicted friends. 🙂

Alpaca lock of fiber — Check out this lock!! It has a slight crimp, is extremely soft and the 4 inch length is going to allow me to spin this baby into lace weight yarn without a problem. (I hope. The spinning wheel will need to snap out of its sulky mood…)

Batt and spinning wheel — I also got a Big Batt from The Natural Twist that I hope to spin a gradient light worsted weight yarn to make a Yowza Weigh-It Shawl 4. This baby is 8 ounces of Romney wool and I can get a whole shawl from it, I’m sure. Doesn’t the spinning wheel look happier already?

This year I was moving fast so I didn’t watch the sheep dogs show or visit the llama events. I did check out lots of alpacas, sheep, bunnies, and goats while I was there. I always have a problem leaving them all there. Surely the neighbors wouldn’t notice one little goat or sheep. Right?

This Jacob sheep really, really wanted to come home with me. Look at that face!

Cashmere goat — This cashmere buck was on sale. For just a few hundred dollars he could have been mine. Those horns, though. I don’t know if the cats would want to play with this guy!

When I was done with the animals and spinning fiber/fleeces for sale I hit the vendor area to see what else I could find.

Yak yarn!! You know I needed to add some of this to my shopping bag. I also bought a great pattern for a lace and garter stitch shawlette called the Culebra Shawlette that will display the handpainted yarn well.

That was it. I could see the clouds were rolling in fast. I only had enough time to buy a bag of cinnamon roasted almonds, make one more chatty stop with friends to compare notes and show off the finds and then I was back in the car heading down the mountain ahead of the storm.

Half an hour later I received a text from a friend. You guessed it. It was raining too hard for her to drive and she was waiting it out up in Estes Park by grabbing a yummy early dinner of grilled lamb kabobs. Darn! I should have been a little slower on the drive after all…

My spinning wheel perked right up when I showed it that huge batt. I’m hoping for a little spell of cooler weather so the wheel and I can get going on making something wonderful together. What do you know? I think that we are friends again.

I knit myself a pair of half-finger mitts a couple of weeks ago using the pattern posted by Andre Sue on her website. The pattern is called Tipsy, and includes both a plain and a fancy ribbed version. I modified the plain version to make myself these mitts from Blue Sky Alpacas sport weight yarn with some modifications. Here’s my project page on Ravelry where I noted my modifications.

Alpaca Mitts — Here’s my finished mitts. They fit great, are really warm, and I like them. Don’t they look a little plain?

I decided to try to embellish the mitts to jazz them up a little. I hunted through my knitting books and found directions for knitted and crocheted flowers. A dig through the stash produced a light grey alpaca lace yarn, and after some false starts and a lot of anxiety with the crochet flower I finally produced some.

Small Knitted Flowers — I used the pattern for small knitted flowers found in Louisa Harding’s Knitting in the Details to make these.

The pattern for this flower was found in Vogue Knitting Stitchionary 6. — The pattern for this flower was found in Vogue Knitting Stitchionary 6 (it is pattern #203, “Flower Show”)

I spent the afternoon arranging things onto the mitts, and here is the first one.

Embellished mitts — Looking good!! These will look very cute with my black cold weather coat.

Fun, huh! Almost too cute to wear.

Tag: Alpaca

Spinning Inspiration: The Estes Park Wool Market

FO: Embellished Alpaca Half-finger Mitts