The Heathen Housewife

Anyone remember this giant bag of alpaca roving I bought at Shepherd’s Harvest last month? It’s so funny saying that. I was catching up with a spinning acquaintance yesterday, and I mentioned that I’d finished spinning a pound of alpaca from Shepherd’s Harvest, and she just about spit out the drink she was sipping. She definitely did a double-take, and that made me realize that it really is a bit crazy having spun up this crazy pile in less than a month.

And then I mentioned that I spun it into two-ply laceweight, and my friend was really impressed. Really impressed with how incredibly obsessive-compulsive I must be to spin that much in one month.

A total of 1958 yards of two-ply laceweight alpaca yarn.

It is so soft, so fuzzy, so naturally lovely, lovely, lovely.

The really cool thing about this project was that I learned something new, something that I’d been really curious about since I started spinning, something that intimidated the hell out of me and seemed almost impossible that I’d actually learn to do myself. And it happened kind of by accident.

For the first half-bobbin’s worth of singles, I sat there struggling with my normal worsted inch-worm approach to drafting out the roving. And then, magically, I don’t know how, I sort of accidentally started spinning woolen. The twist ran into the fluff, and continued to stretch. I was getting great consistently thin yar

This sweetness is about 19 or 20 wpi, and I spun it mostly on my Rose. I did about half a bobbins’ worth on the Earl, but Rose just works better for skinny, skinny yarns with the higher ratios.

I’ve been wanting to knit something out of Knitted Lace of Estonia since it came out. Maybe this will finally be the yarn for the project.

Meanwhile, back in real life…the girls and I were headed out to run an errand this afternoon, and Sophie stopped to glance at the cocoon that’s been sitting in our garage since last September when the giant caterpillar we brought home from the State Fair wrapped itself up and went nappy-nappy for the winter. Hello, giant moth!

We’ve been waiting for so long, glancing at the container just about every day and wondering if and when it would come out, and what it would be like when it did.

And then there it was, all of a sudden. Look at those crazy-fuzzy antenna! It was still flapping its wings to dry them fully, and I was hoping it would sit on the girls’ hands for a few moments before it flew away…

They were pretty excited about it, but the experience was over pretty quickly.

We stood and watched it for a few minutes, and I was just about to suggest that we leave it be and continue on our way to buy shoes (and oh, my gosh, didn’t we just buy new sneakers and now they’ve grown again?!?) when the moth fluttered its wings and flew off out of sight.

I blocked the first sleeve and finished knitting the second on that sweater, so now I have to face the reality of knitting up my half-assed idea of how the top is going to work. More on that next time.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 4:02 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.