Full Circle

Last year I made the evenstar shawl for my wife. A great pattern made from a gorgeous black alpaca fleece spun up in a light fingering weight. The shawl is beautiful even though i think the 5 lines of beads are too much and too sparkly a bit, hence the nickname the Discoshawl as it goes by now.

I did feel it wasn't complete, it was an "evil" evenstar and to bring balance to the universe and everything a light twin had to be created.

A coworker who had seen my work on facebook thought it was quite something and wanted something special for his wife's birthday which has not happened yet (she doesnt read this blog and it is separate from my facebook so I can post it already). He really liked the evenstar I showed him from Danielle.



Due to time constraints I could not spin wool for this shawl and give him the choice of color, the only spun up wool i had where i had enough quantity of was a natural / white alpaca. Hence the wish for the light twin was answered.

I worked on it and again due to time constraints did not want to put the 5 rows of beads on it (just the edging too 4 weeks the first time around). Now in a little over a month the evenstar was done, with a nice single row of green beads as an interesting edge to it. Not as much as the black one where the beads draw all the attention but enough to cause a nice extra sparkle around the edge.

I hope the receiver will be very happy with the end result and if possible I will post some pictures of her with the shawl here.

I also still have to take some pictures of the dark and light twins together one of the coming days.

Rock Island

The Rock Island Shawl was a quick in between knit with some handspun natural/white alpaca wool in fingering weight. It was a pleasant and supereasy knit as it used 4.5 mm needles which feel like treetrunks compared to my preferred 3mm lace needles. It turned out quite nice and was knit for a person who been through some rough times last year and I felt they needed something nice to happen and this was my contribution to world happiness for the moment.

I have also spun up a first fleece from an alpaca in the color rosegrey, which will be knit into a Damask pattern shawl. It is beautifully soft. I got some project lined up I want to knit, In Dream in Drops Lace (soft, shiny and beautiful but still very cheap), and Galadriels Mirror (can you tell i love Susan Pandorfs patterns), but for this I am currently spinning up a 1st place winning fleece of CD Latino. Beautiful Fleece, white, soft, good crimp and good staple lenght. Will take a bit before I have enough to knit this but the other two can be knit first.

I am also working on a job for another evenstar, this time in white with some green beads, I love to knit this pattern the second time around even more. For me personally it completes it, a white and a black evenstar, even though the white one is already sold.
This will have to be finished before I can think of knitting anything else anyways.

Return from a long absence

It has been quite a while since I posted anything here. And the longer you stay away the higher the hurdle becomes to restart this. So now I have taken the big step and took the effort to start another post. I am not even going to attempt to recap the last 6 months. I have created a lot of yarn in that period and created some shawls.

One of them was this "masterpiece", the evenstar :
This shawl was made from a 1st place winning fleece of a black alpaca and turned out beautiful.


On good friday this year I went back to the same alpaca farm and bought a total of 9 fleeces (all showfleeces) which I will turn into some beautiful shawls again this year.

I am currently working on the Rock Island shawl making in white alpaca :
Currently have made 14 repeats of the edge as this shawl is an edge inward knit shawl.

I am also almost finished knitting the first thing for myself *GASP*.... I have made a rectangular shawl named Goldberry, the same designer as the evenstar. Very very nice soft darkbrown alpaca homespun yarn. I have to take some pictures soon as it is done.

On the spinning side of things I have a new wheel, I have sold my antique wheel and bought a Louet S10 whcih has a bit more options and works a bit nicer and smoother.

Currently on my wheel I have a baby alpaca fleece from the set of showfleeces, it is a very miraculour colour called Rosegrey. This fleece ranging from grey to a brownish red. The spun yarn is a very beautiful color.

Fleece to Shawl

What you see here is part of the fleece of CD Pebbles, a gorgeous fawn alpaca. I have bought this fleece earlier this year after this fleece took third place in the show. It was buttery soft on the skinside and a pleasure to spin. Total weight of the fleece was 600 gram and I have spun around 2700 meters in 2 ply from this fleece. It has ended up as this project, part of the citron shawl and will also be made into a shawlette.



Here are a few of the centerpull balls after the fleece has been spun.



A spool half filled with singles which have been plied into 2ply laceweight yarn since then.


A work in progress of the aeolian with the bead showing on top of the fleece from which it came.


The whole shawl which turned out way bigger then expected but it is beautiful. Around 3000 beads were used in the process of making it. Here it is layed out on the floor pinned and wet blocking it into shape. There was a lot of give in it while blocking so it ended up even bigger. I think about 15-20% bigger then the knit size.

82.681 stitches later......

I have spun up three different alpaca fleeces. I had around 450 meters left of natural/white alpaca (alpaca is named AH Aguila). Then I have spun up some dark chocolate brown alpaca as well, i have used around 900 meters of this color (CD Contador) and last I have used a bit of a beige fleece (CD Pebbles) which is very buttery soft, thank goodness i have a lot left of this fleece and hopefully I can spin up enough of this fleece to make the aeolian.

To make a quick and big project I made the citron and have done 10 repeats on 3mm circular needles. It looks great and after wetblocking it it almost doubled in size and become so much softer.

Here some pictures :

Spun to finished with photos

Recently I finished another handspun project. The project was a request from youngest daughter D. Her old poncho made by a friend of my wife's was getting too small and now she needed a new one.

The fleece was purchased back in February from a alpaca farm in the southern regions of holland. It was a 2008 baby alpaca fleece weighing about 400 grams. The fleece was washed, rinsed several times (4 or 5) before it was dried and "rested".




The fleece was spun over a very long period as the fleece was very short staples (1-1.5 inches max) and all the ends of the hairs still had the baby curl in them making it even harder. After many new cursewords and breaks I managed to get 2 spools with enough singles to ply and actually make something out of. I ended up with around 550 meters of 2ply 20wpi extremely soft yarn. The twist was set in hot water and the yarn rolled into a center pull ball.

Then in a period of 2 weeks I knitted a poncho from the Drops pattern into a medium size as it will give her some room to grow into. The edge was then done with a nice fluffy bit of leftover yarn to give it a nice accent.
During the washing of the garment, according to my wife gave 5 sinkfulls of black water, yuck these alpacas are dirty animals :P and their fibre holds the dirt like crazy.
With washing you get rid of a lot, during spinning there is a lot of sand that falls out, during plying more dust falls out and the final garment is still very "dirty".

In the end the poncho is extremely soft and light, she loves it which is what is most important.

Blog Award

This morning doing my usual rounds of the blogs I follow I find I have been passed a blog award by Jenny, wow blogging for only a little while this is very unexpected.

I am supposed to write about the 10 things in life that make me happy, which should not be all that difficult. I will try to put some pictures with it as no one really enjoys reading a long novel online without some pictures to spice it up.

So here goes 10 thing that make me happy (in no particular order) :

1. Danielle
I "met" her the first time online in 1992, we met first time in real life in 1999, got married in 2002 and been together ever since and spend every day together and I love her with all my heart and wouldn't know what to do without her.

2. Movies
Good movies make me really happy, though good movies are more and more rare these days but certain movies just make me so happy. I will devote a complete new post someday to my top 10 movielist and why they are on that list but we will leave that to another time and day.

3. My health
After having some big problems with health related issues in the past years I am happy for the things I can do (some with moderations) and happy I am still very much in decent health otherwise.

4. Formula 1
I have always been a big fan of this sport and more and more I learn about it the better it gets and the more I love it. The sound, the technical side of things. I know it is hard to understand but for me this is like what Take That used to be for young girls :P.

5. Friends
Though the amount of friends I have is very limited the few I do have are very much appreciated and are always there when I need them and same goes the other way around. I love the feeling there is no obligation at all. And we can not see each other for months and then when we do it still feels like that last time we saw each other was yesterday.


6. The Monkeys
Both my kids, they each bring on their own set of challenges and difficulties but also each are their own personality and completely different and it makes you see the world in a different light from time to time. They are always able to distract me from whatever it is i am doing. Wouldn't want the world without them.

7. Knitting
I love making things with my hands but I am totally not handy, so unlike the manly things to do as woodworking and metalworking which are totally not for me I have picked up knitting during my RSI period last year and it stuck. I like it so much that it has become somewhat of an addiction. The idea of making something very pretty with just a piece of string and some needles fascinates me. And I like it even more to make some really pretty things that I otherwise couldn't buy for my family. All these items and unique since they are made by me.

8. Spinning
A seperate thing from knitting as it is a totally different experience, it is not so much for the making of yarn that I love this as it is for the fact that it forces you to slow down. Spinning needs to happen at its own slow speed. If you try to go to fast the yarn will come out rough and hard, not good.
I love being busy with alpaca fleeces and making beautiful yarns from it which feed my other hobby cheaply.

9. Driving
I love driving, esp late at night in the dark in the rain. That is the best, I could drive for hours and hours like that. Weird but I guess that is me.

10. Music
"Music soothes even the savage beast", who doens't like music. The music I love is very diverse, from country (Garth Brooks, Lonestar etc) to death metal (In flames, Il Nino) and a ton of different varieties in between depending on the time of day and my mood. There is always a song somewhere to cheer me up.

And I will pass on this award to the following people (sorry i cannot make a whole 10 people :(, guess not blogging long enough yet).

Annemiek from Spin verf Brei
Annika from Belinda's Mamma
Allison from Alaskan Purl
Aislynn from Knit Purl Stitch