Saturday, August 28, 2010

End of a blog holiday

Although I haven't been either motivated or had much time to blog recently I'm still doing lots of fibre related things. So firstly some examples of the dyeing for both the 'Tote' shop and Flagstaff Alpacas. The picture above is a new colourway 'Ribbon' in 4ply 100% alpaca.
Then one of my favourites - 'Poison'. It's not the quickest to do as there are four colour to paint onto the skein and all of them are mixed, blended colours so it takes a little while to make up the colours. again on 4ply alpaca.
100g of 4ply alpaca in 'Fiesta' which is always a popular colourway. We do most of these colours in the boucle alpaca too and 8ply.
The boucle always comes out looking a little paler, than it does on the smoother yarns.
Above - another new colourway on the 4ply "Stormtrooper'. Olive, teal and dark blue with grey.
Our yarns are also available to purchase on the Flagstaff website. I'm dyeing more repeatable colours by recording the dye colours and how they are applied to the skeins. There are always some skeins which are unique and non repeatable but these are now coded NR.
The yarn sales have grown a lot over the last two years, with customers from both home and away overseas. So thank you if you have bought some and are using it. The alpacas are growing plenty more fibre. All these yarns are grown and spun in Otago. We are so fortunate to still have the Milton spinning mill operating despite the recession.
I'm so grateful my husband added a roof to the deck as I've been able to dye through a cold wet winter this year although they take several days to dry on the dull rainy days.

Below - I've been playing with network drafting on the dobby loom. I'm not too sure about this sample but it is an interesting technique which I plan to do a lot more when I can find some more playtime.