Last June while trawling through another upper blue mountains garage sale, I came across a pile of tangled balls of yarn. 50c a ball. at first glance it looked like cheap acrylic or something similarly nasty so i ignored the yarn, and moved on to other things. however a second glance and feel revealed the yarn to be alpaca. but not just alpaca, hand-spun alpaca. and not just anyway alpaca, but the one standing in the field on the other side of the house!
So, for $2.50 i bought 5 balls of handspun natural black alpaca. But of course, next came the agony of deciding how best to use said yarn. A few test runs of various patterns and I finally decided on Abalone.
This is me proudly posing in my new garments at the Wave Rock music festival near hyden. The lime green item trying to strangle me is a bitterroot shawl made in Malabrigo Lace (colourway: Lime). You can find a better images of the garment as made by others on Ravelry.
The great thing about the pattern is that as its all one piece and doesn’t involve shaping you have free range to modify as you please. As my gauge was different to the original pattern I did have to spend a bit of time re-calculating number of stitches, and the armholes for some reason proved a bit tricky. Thankfully alpaca after a few washes sttreeeetcchs quite nicely so there are no tight spots anymore.
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