Handspun Alpaca Lace Scarfette

blocking the scarfette

After a few weeks of work, most recently while listening to "My Antonia" by Willa Cather, the last of my raw alpaca fibers were transformed into yarn.  Last year I had processed the better part of a grocery sack of fiber into yarn and made scarves for a friend.  She owns the alpacas and (gasp!) just had the fiber languishing in her living room!  Most of that fiber was prepared with a dog comb or my mini combs (it's been long enough that I don't remember which!) and this fiber was the stuff that was too short from that original processing.  I carded this and made a sport-weight two-ply yarn.

Once the yarn was spun & wet finished, I started knitting lace.  The first pattern I tried had four or five pattern rows.  By row three or four I had made a mistake, and found a one-pattern-row lace.  Whew.  I can do one row of lace patterning!

Alpaca scarfette

Here it is, carded, spun, knit, blocked and ready to be worn.  The little pin is a handcarved do-dad that I whittled just to have something to hold the scarf together.  Alpaca is a wonderful fiber--so soft! 

Applesauce Spoons

It's applesauce season at my house.  Each year we make as much applesauce as we can.  We love to eat the stuff!

The last few years as we have stirred the gloriously hot, sweet applesauce we have burned our fingers.  We have learned to use the glass lids to our big pots as face shields so the applesauce volcanoes don't get us, but with our little spoons we have not been able to protect our fingers.

New spoons and old spoons together.

Check out our new applesauce spoons!  These new spoons are bamboo, just like the other spoons we like, but are at least 8" longer.  They work wonderfully!  Lots of leverage for stirring the full apple pots plus lots of extra,outside-of-the-pot space to hold the spoon.

Hooray for wonderful utensils! (And for a wonderful Ace Hardware store that stocks "oddities" like these!)