I’m halfway through spinning up my alpaca fibre. I’ve got one ounce spun and plied and set and skeined. It looks so lovely and feels even better. It seemed a bit rough when I was doing the plying; I was worried that I’d put too much twist into it and made it kind of wiry but a little bath and a bit of a stretch plumped the fibres back up again. I could just sit here and squeeze it ... but then I couldn’t type. I can’t wait to get started on the second ounce and have two of these lovely little skeins sitting in my basket.

 

Actually, it’s alpaca fibre from Alberta. This is another bunch of birthday fibre. I started spinning it up at a spinning demonstration I attended a few weeks ago. It feels wonderful to spin. It’s so soft and the individual fibres move apart very easily. The staple is long too so I don’t find my strip of roving breaking apart very often.
 
I’m spinning this very thin in the hopes of plying back on itself and getting enough yarn at the right weight to make the Wine and Roses Mitts from Interweave Knits Winter 2006 issue. I think they are so pretty and girly but the alpaca will make them reasonably warm too - just right for fall and spring or in my chilly office.

There it is ... one ounce of hand-spun cotton yarn. I’m not sure how long it is - I’ll have to measure when I wind it off - but hopefully it will be long enough for this pattern from Blue Sky Alpacas. It’s a crochet pattern so I’ll be learning something new there too.

The long draw technique started to feel a bit more natural as I worked my way through the second half ounce and the roving didn’t split apart as frequently. I still found joining kind of difficult but didn’t have to do it as often. It’s pretty lumpy-bumpy yarn but I like it. There are a few places when it got so thin I thought it would break but didn’t and I discovered I was looking at short pieces of real cotton thread.

How amazing to think that this same stuff is what makes up my favourite clothes (and my entire Regency costume) and here I’ve just turned it from fluff into yarn with my own hands. People used to do this all the time; every piece of cotton cloth started out as fluff and became yarn or thread on a spindle not too different from this one before being woven on some sort of loom.

A close up for texture.