Road trip!
Hello blog! I've missed you. Things have been a wee bit nutty around here in the last week, but I'm hoping things have calmed down enough for me to be able to get back to the regular schedule of life. I have at least three long blogposts worth of pictures to share with you, most of which are from our travels around Yorkshire and the Lake District before school started last week. But I want to share a somewhat shorter, less-child-focused road trip that I took over the weekend with Allison up to Toft Alpacas.
Let me just start by saying this post is totally a ploy to be able to post a metric ton of cute alpaca pictures, with a little yarn on the side. You have been warned. If you need more alpaca cuteness, there are more photos over on Flickr.
We pulled in to the car park by these lovely ladies, and then headed inside for a day of playing with colors under the expert tutelage of Debbie Tomkies of DT Craft & Design.
The Toft Studio is a fabulous place, full of their yarn and patterns knitted up, all in a glorious array of natural colors.
Then it was time to get to work. First up were some samples with varying dye concentrations in the same color.
Then some experiments in color blending...
While those samples were cooked and rinsed, we went out for a quick tour of the Toft Alpacas farm. **WARNING: MANY, MANY PICTURES OF ADORABLE FUZZY BEASTIES AHEAD**
There they were, hanging out in a field, minding their own business, when SQUEEEEEE - CRIA!!!!
You can bury me now - I am dead from the adorableness.
Then we went into one of the paddocks (are they called paddocks in the UK? Must investigate...). Our guide said "Alpaca are very inquisitive." Indeed:
Ded. Ded of the cutes. I am now in desperate need of my own herd of alpaca to keep in the back garden. I'm sure Himself and the neighbors, not to mention the Richmond-upon-Thames Borough Council, will totally understand...
After our walk, we moved on to 25 gr skeins of lace weight that had been mis-packaged by the mill (i.e. 25 gr instead of 100 gr).
and eventually to full skeins. That's Allison's skein of Jacob Aran-weight (which came out amazingly - check out her photo!), and I did a skein of BFL sock yarn.
Everyone ended up with gorgeous yarns!
(the two on the right in this picture are mine)
And before we left, I managed to do something I'd wanted to do all day...
It was a fabulous day, and many thanks to Debbie and the folks at Toft for making it happen!
Let me just start by saying this post is totally a ploy to be able to post a metric ton of cute alpaca pictures, with a little yarn on the side. You have been warned. If you need more alpaca cuteness, there are more photos over on Flickr.
We pulled in to the car park by these lovely ladies, and then headed inside for a day of playing with colors under the expert tutelage of Debbie Tomkies of DT Craft & Design.
The Toft Studio is a fabulous place, full of their yarn and patterns knitted up, all in a glorious array of natural colors.
Then it was time to get to work. First up were some samples with varying dye concentrations in the same color.
Then some experiments in color blending...
While those samples were cooked and rinsed, we went out for a quick tour of the Toft Alpacas farm. **WARNING: MANY, MANY PICTURES OF ADORABLE FUZZY BEASTIES AHEAD**
There they were, hanging out in a field, minding their own business, when SQUEEEEEE - CRIA!!!!
You can bury me now - I am dead from the adorableness.
Then we went into one of the paddocks (are they called paddocks in the UK? Must investigate...). Our guide said "Alpaca are very inquisitive." Indeed:
Ded. Ded of the cutes. I am now in desperate need of my own herd of alpaca to keep in the back garden. I'm sure Himself and the neighbors, not to mention the Richmond-upon-Thames Borough Council, will totally understand...
After our walk, we moved on to 25 gr skeins of lace weight that had been mis-packaged by the mill (i.e. 25 gr instead of 100 gr).
and eventually to full skeins. That's Allison's skein of Jacob Aran-weight (which came out amazingly - check out her photo!), and I did a skein of BFL sock yarn.
Everyone ended up with gorgeous yarns!
(the two on the right in this picture are mine)
And before we left, I managed to do something I'd wanted to do all day...
It was a fabulous day, and many thanks to Debbie and the folks at Toft for making it happen!