There’s been slow but steady progress on the BFL/alpaca roving. I finished up a second ginormous skein this week. I lost count but I think it’s upwards of 700 yards. Winnie was keeping a wary eye on the proceedings.

My Bluefaced Leicester/Alpaca blend roving is starting to turn into a lovely lofty 3-ply yarn with a beautiful heathered brown color and a nice luster.  This first skein is 470 yards and I’m hoping to have enough for a sweater when it’s all spun up.  I’m hoping to stick with this until it’s all done but sometimes I get fickle after a visit to SPA and all the lovely fiber there.

Whoops, memory failed me. I haven’t been spinning cormo/romney to ply with my angora. Durante’s fleece is actually BFL/cormo and now it’s all plied up. I have a skein of 2-ply BFL/cormo and a skein of 3-ply that has 2 plies BFL/cormo and 1 ply angora. The yarn turned out very lofty indeed.

I finished spinning my lovely bunny fluff. I am planning to ply it against some Durante (cormo/romey) which matches most of the fluff in a browner grey sort of color. If you look closely at the angora bobbin on the right, you can see a bit of the browner color peeping through the truer grey. Most of the angora is the browner color. I want to make a three ply so I’ve filled up one bobbin with Durante’s roving and am working on a second. Riley has been “helping” by making off withe the Durante roving the second I turn my back. It has a very sheepy smell that she just can’t resist because normally she’s not particularly interested. It’s hard to chastise her when you are laughing so hard.

I finished a bobbin of the medium brown merino I bought at Rhinebeck at the beginning of the week and have started working with the gorgeous grey angora. It’s really relaxing to just spin a bit when we watch TV in the evenings.

I don’t like to let things sit on the bobbins too long or I forget what they are so this week I’ve plied up all my singles. The top three images are all llama from roving I bought from Rhodie Hill Farm at Rhinebeck a few years ago. I got 240 yards so when I spin the other half I should have enough for a small shawl. The other photos are more yarn from Tarragon, a cormo/romney who’s fleece I buy ever year. I get a little better each time I spin more of that and this is my floofiest sproingiest Tarragon yarn ever. I have about 260 yards of that. I’d originally intended to ply it with something else but changed my mind so there’s no particular project for this but I could use some gloves or mittens.

This is what occupied my time during a good portion of the power outage. The pattern isn’t available anymore but you can probably reverse engineer it. It’s quite similar to the knitted winter shawl (bottom button) only more stripey. The yarn is handspun with the natural color being from Tarragon’s fleece that I buy every year. The red is a merino braid in Black Cherry from Spunky Eclectic. I needed something easy to knit in low light conditions and this fit the bill nicely. It’ll come along more slowly now that I have power back and can see to do other more complicated things.

I’ve started working on the alpaca/BFL blend roving I had made with Shale’s 2010 fleece. It seems to want to spin very fine so I’m planning to do a 3-ply and that means it won’t be done anytime soon. Gabby is keeping a close eye on the process.

This is a wool/alpaca blend. I ended up with about 100 yards and I have two darker red batts that should go nicely with this. I plied it back onto itself and instead of using the CD spindle this time, I just put the centerpull ball into a coffee mug. That worked very nicely.

Because spinning helps keep things moving for my knee and thus helps it heal, I’ve been doing a fair bit this past week. I finished up some alpaca from Gilead Fiber Farm. It’s a pretty blue and should be enough for a small shawlette or something along those lines.