Spinning, Dying and Knitting

I have been dying with drink mix again. This skein of yarn is handspun by me. It was great fun to spin this slubby art yarn. I used a white Rambouillet fleece that came from a friend in MN. He is a certified Organic farmer, meaning the fleece is certified organic too. There was a bunch of vegetable matter(grasses) in it, but by the time it was washed, spun, plied, dyed, rinsed and rinsed, the yarn is clean! I plied the yarn with sewing thread, to help get even more lumps and bumps. The thread didn't take the dye, you need to have protein/animal fiber to use the drink mix successfully. I knew that ahead of time and wanted that look.
This is a gorgeous plum color, I am so happy to get this color. I used a bag of berry blue and a bag of cherry. There are 56 yards of yarn in this skein.


This next yarn is mainly an alpaca yarn. One ply(strand) of the yarn is pure alpaca from Jacob's Reward Farm. I had 4 ounces of it, so I decided to spin it thin and ply it with another yarn that I had here. I really did get this yarn thin! I don't think I have EVER spun anything this thin before
I truly didn't expect to get it this thin, but it is. I ended up plying it with a coned yarn that I bought from WEBS . Webs is a great yarn store. Located in Massachussetts, they have lots of yarns and closeouts of yarns. I like to watch the closeouts. So, in one of their closeouts, they

had a cone of an Alpaca/Silk blend of lace weight yarn. That is what I used to ply with my alpaca. The darker gray is the Jacob's Reward alpaca and the lighter is the Webs coned yarn. My end result is sooooooooooo soft, that I cannot believe it. I have 7.4 ounces of yarn and 681 yards, all in one skein.

And last, but not least, is the shawl that I knitted from my drink mix dyed yarns from several posts ago. This shawl is so light and airy and fluffy. I am truly suprised at the outcome. I don't

even know if my pictures do it justice. But here it is, with Mandi the Mannequin behind it.