The giant blue project - the dyeing

I never spun big amounts of yarn at once, besides strawberry yarn maybe, but that usually is still a bit different from skein to skein. Now I met that lady in Geneva who fell in love with my yarns, and she was interested in a big amount of yarn for a reasonable sized project. It should be soft and in shades of blue, and having still a quite big stock of alpaca fiber, I suggested merino and alpaca, and we agreed on 500g of twoply.
Last week I finally had the time to dye the alpaca and it was quite a big bunch. I used some koolaid, easter egg dyes and acid dyes, and ended up with different blues.


I got me a used salad spinner for some bucks by the way, which turned out to be quite useful. I already pre-dryed yarn with it without having it to squeeze, and it was also good to get the hot dye soup out of the fiber after microwaving it.

Yesterday I carded up all of the alpaca fiber and ended up with four fluffy batts, weighing 250g in total.


Next step is carding it into merino/alpaca mix batts, and then spinning them up. But first I have to spin off the residues on my big bobbins to have enough space for this.