At the end of February, David Smith wrote:
Enjoyed your blog. Where do you have your alpacas?
I have 6 alpacas here in Huntsville.
Hope to see you in next weekend at the show. I will be showing one or my alapacas.

He is referring to the the Southern Select alpaca show which was held recently in the area. I’ve been busy, so I basically ignored it. I’m still feeling set back by my trip to Wisconsin, although things around here are starting to feel caught up – except spring is happening. Our alpacas are on a farm in south-central Tennessee. They are for sale if anybody is interested.

On March 1, Sarah and Jody both commented on my onion dome hat. Sarah suggested a pattern that looks rather interesting.

Thank you both for the comments. I think that hat turned out rather well. I have another one in progress – although right now it’s starting to look wide enough to be a sombrero. I’m on the decreases, so I should have pictures soon.

On March 12, Jody commented again, this time about my scarf. She wrote:
Thats really beautiful…I like that crotchet stitch. I usually don’t use crotchet, just knitting.

Thank you, Jody. I, too, think that scarf turned out very well. I’m really proud of myself because I “invented” the stitch – although more accurately, I suppose I should say I discovered it for myself because I’m sure it has been used for hundreds of years. Crochet is the comfort craft among my fiber crafts. I learned to crochet as a small boy – almost forty years ago now. The difficulty I have is that I love spinning, and so much alpaca yarn just doesn’t work well in the in crochet fabrics – knitting works better – or at least I often like the knit fabric better. I started playing with a double-ended crochet hook and I experimented until I found a stitch that looked good and rewarded the fiber.

In this post, I am supposed to show you the second onion dome hat – the follow-up to this post.

It’s not happening today, and there will be no pictures.

There have been setbacks.

Version 2 was worked in a heavier, black, alpaca yarn – millspun from some of our animals. The knit part felt fine – like a nice, warm, thick, alpaca hat. The crocheted fabric, however, felt like a board. It as too knotty and too dense. I’m sure it would have been very warm, but it was so stiff and heavy, it would have mashed hair by weight alone – no stretch or compression necessary.

It has been frogged. I am working a third version in a much lighter weight millspun. It isn’t really far enough along to show anything yet. I’m already thinking about a fourth version.

I used this scarf as my travel project for my Wisconsin trip. I originally purchased the yarn over a year ago thinking I would use a double-ended crochet technique (crochet knit) involving this yarn and some dark brown handspun alpaca. After additional consideration, I decided not to use the alpaca.

I tried a true crochet-knit technique, and I just didn’t like the results. What I settled is really a Tunisian or Afghan crochet using alternating ends of a circular crochet hook.

Close-up picture of the stitch pattern showing the Afghan or Tunisian crochet modified by using alternate ends of a double-ended crochet hook.

I used two skeins of yarn, as in a crochet-knit technique. However, the stitch I used was actually closer to an afghan or tunisian pattern. However, instead of working this pattern with only one strand and one end of the crochet hook, I turned the work each time I completed the pattern. With all the loops on the hook, change ends, and crochet all the loops off. Using that same end of the hook, work all the loops back on. Turn the work, change ends of the hook, and repeat.

Yarn is Rowan tapestry. I used two balls of color 170, Country, and about half a ball of color 172, Pot Pourri. I started one end using country for both strands, worked the middle section with one strand of each color, then finished by working the other end with country – eventually getting one of my two strands from the center of yarn and the other from the outside of the same ball as I ran out of yarn.

The scarf is very pretty. I’m really happy with how it turned out. I like the pattern. I think the colors worked better than if I had attempted to use the solid, dark brown, alpaca as a ground color. The stitch is something I want to try with alpaca once I spin the right yarn. I think this stitch would work particularly well with suri. I’ll make something like this again.

I’m still making progress on the project that won’t die never ending project. I thought I would have everything finished by now and the yarn delivered, but a sudden trip to the great wintery north intervened.

This is the yarn I spun from Anna’s fiber, last mentioned here. It has been washed, and it is drying. Once it is dry, maybe I can finally make the arrangements to deliver it.

A number of years ago, at a fiber show, I saw a handspinner who had tied all her leftover single-ply yarns together and plied them to make a skein of odds and ends yarn. She said the technique was really popular. I recall thinking it had a lot of potential, but even though I was just beginning to learn to spin, I thought I could do better.

More recently, I’ve noted the popularity of commercial eyelash and novelty yarns.

In between, I have seen and felt many blends – of fiber, color, and materials – available as yarn, batting, roving, picked fiber, or simply bags of scraps. I’ve even worked with some of them.

I have hoarded odds and ends of fiber, and tossed all the leftovers, trimmed ends, etc. into a bit.

A couple years ago, I started making crocheted flowers for Pam’s paper crafting. Every time I make a crocheted flower, I end up with a piece of cotton crochet thread 0.5 to 1.25 inches long. I make a lot of crocheted flowers in a lot of different colors – many more colors than shown in that picture – and for some reason, I’ve been keeping all those cut ends.

The reason occurred to me a while back – actually, before we bought the house last spring – and I’ve only recently had the opportunity to follow up the project. I wanted to make my own Oddiments and Endiments Yarn.

Odds and ends – pieces of string, chunks of fiber, yarn ends, and other things – carded together and respun.

Using hand cards, I carded the odds and ends I could card. (I’m saving some for when I get the picker.) I carded some cut ends from the crocheted flowers into the fiber and held some out. I then spun the fiber, adding the short cotton ends from the crocheted flowers to the drafting triangle from time to time.

This yarn is a single. The diameter is highly variable and it is full of weak spots. I want to make another funky single like this one and ply the two together.

This yarn is probably more alpaca than anything. It is guaranteed to contain huacaya alpaca, suri alpaca, cotton, cotton crochet thread, acrylic, silk, wool and flash. It probably also contains mohair, pygora, chiengora, ramie, polyester, angora and whatever else I have worked with in the past seven years.

I hope it doesn’t take me five years to accumulate the other half of this future 2-ply skein.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I spent several weeks in Wisconsin this winter. On my return home, Pam picked me up at the airport. My flight had been delayed – the usual, bad weather in Atlanta – so we were late. Pam was slightly distracted, but I put that off to not finding me at the airport. We got home, I grabbed my luggage and tried to carry it all into the house at once. The doors aren’t quite that wide. I was trying to squeeze past Pam in a narrow hallway when I noticed …

dog dishes

Hmm, I thought. Very odd. did I see that right? Maybe Pam decided to help with that Border Collie up the street that needed a temporary home. I figured I’d ask when I put my luggage down.

As I walked through the next room, I noticed a dog toy on the floor.

Very curious. I was just about to say something before I put my luggage down when I heard …

Barking.

No question about it. A dog barking. In our house.

Please welcome Sadie.

Please welcome Sadie. She is, supposedly, a Whippet mix – we’re not quite sure – and she is a very good dog who needed a home.

We’ve been looking at, talking about, and thinking about Greyhounds for a number of years. The discussions started up again when we got this house.

The thing about greyhounds, though, is that they are very tall dogs. Recently, we’ve been talking about getting a smaller dog.

What Pam found while I was gone, was a smaller dog with a greyhound personality. She likes her exercise, but when she’s not exercising

she just loves to curl up in her bed.

Edited at 2:09 PM: Additional pictures can be found here.

I need to acknowledge some comments that were posted while I was in Wisconsin for a time this winter.

On February 3, in response to my “I’ve Been Spinning” post, Jody wrote:
That yarn has a nice looking sheen to it. I knit alot with my alpaca handspun yarn. Do you make anything with yours? I seem to remember you were actually knitting some socks?

Thanks, Jody. That fiber is from Anna, and she has some really good brightness.

I do make things with my handspun yarn – mostly hats, some scarves, some small scarves that I call neck wraps, and various other projects. I do more crochet than knitting. I have never made socks with handspun yarn, but I have knit socks using yarn that was millspun using fiber from our alpacas.

I really enjoy spinning. Most days, I prefer spinning to knitting or crochet. Of course, the finished product of spinning is yarn which is really only an intermediate, and knitting needles are so much more portable than a spinning wheel.

And, on February 6, Amy wrote in response to a post on spinning suri:
I recently saw your post on spinning suri and have been dong some of my own over the past few years. I’ve skipped the whole carding and combing process to find that I just like picking the fiber to loosen it into mounds of fluff and spinning it from there. This gives the fiber some body where it might be lacking if completely combed. It still drafts easily. I’ve since made several projects.

Thank you Amy, and I see some very pretty items on your website.

Your comment about just picking suri is very interesting. I don’t have a picker – yet – so I haven’t tried that approach. I think it’s interesting that you’re achieving some body that way. I have a picker in my plans and I think that’s an interesting approach.

I do have a question about prickle, because I know that when I spin stronger suri fiber, I have to avoid hairpin bends in the fiber, because those bends really add to the prickle of the yarn. Have you any experience with increased prickle when you use this technique, or what do you do to avoid it? (It may be that you’re simply using a much softer suri fiber than most of what I have had the opportunity to work with.)

I’m a great believer in taking what the fiber gives me. Really good suri fiber is silky, has sheen, and has excellent drape. I’ve had only limited opportunities to work with really good suri, and I have chosen, mostly, to accentuate the strengths of suri in spinning. The suri in the article in question is VERY low-grade. I found the best thing to do with it was to blend it with huacaya. I have a lot of experiments in mind for spinning from picked fiber – when and if I get that picker. I’ll have to add your suri technique to the list.

Today’s post was supposed to be on other topics, but mother nature intervened.

For the record, these pictures are taken March 1, 2009 at a Harvest, Alabama address. This is real. This is natural. We did not rent the local snow machine.

Just enough snow to be pretty. Not cold enough to harm the daffodils. I suspect the roads are fine, but I don’t plan on going anywhere today.

I think I may mix up more hot cocoa mix.