My golden fleece

I'm ever so slowly working my way through the alpaca fleece that I was given best part of a year ago now.  It's such a beautiful joy working with something so "raw" and close to nature.  I get so used to spinning with mill prepared fibre, usually already dyed and ready for me just to take those final two steps of spinning and knitting, that it's humbling and awe inspiring to take the process back even further.  There's the crazy washing that turns tan/brown to white:

And then there's the deciding what to do with it.  I've spindle spun some undyed before I got the wheel.

But since I've had the wheel, I've done another one of my epic dying sessions with Sarah, and I used the alpaca, as it's beautiful creamy whiteness screams out to be dyed, to use up left over dye baths and exhausts.  I did this by shoving handfuls of the dried washed fibre into a plastic bag and then pouring the dye in.  This worked ok, but there was poor penetration to the centre of the handfuls, leaving undyed spots.  With this, I arranged it into a rainbow, carded and spun to quite a chunky n-ply.  I used this to start a small colourful blanket, based on Elizabeth Zimmerman's Pi Shawl, but run out before I got it to a decent size.

And so the blanket went on hold, but I did get round to a special little alpaca project, by carding some undyed alpaca with some undyed silk, in a roughly 80/20 blend and spun it on a spindle that I had been given, courtesy of Karen at Wildcraft.  She had been experimenting with polymer clay whorls, and I had absolutely fallen in love with one of her prototypes, and she very kindly snuck it in with a fibre club installment.  The alpaca/silk seemed like the perfect way of christening this very special and much loved little spindle.  I love how soft and shiney this yarn is.  There's not a lot of it, about 115m of thick laceweight, so I have no idea what I'll do with it.  But I'm sure I'll have fun deciding!

(Clearly my handcarding still not as smooth as it could be, but it's improving!)

So I've just dyed up some more, using dye baths on the stove and larger handfuls.  My rainbow progression will be spoilt, but it'll still be wonderfully colourful. I wanted to do a goldeny colour, which always amazes me that I have to add plum to yellow to get, but it works out so well.  It's finally more or less dry, so I spent tonight picking it, ready to be carded, when I get round to it, likely to be at the weekend.

 My golden fleece

 The short second cuts that make for really bumpy spinning and some veg matter still coming out.

 Lovely little golden lock, pre-picking

A golden cloud of alpaca fluff

This single alpaca fleece has given me seemingly endless hours of crafting, and has helped me produce so many different projects.  Most of all it's been a fantastic learning tool - and I still have quite a bit of it left over!  Yippee!