Finished Scarves and Spinning

Wool/silk scarves with painted warps.

 The scarves are off the loom :).  They are a wool silk blend, with hand painted warps using weak acid dyes. These were the very old mixed dyes that, despite being a bit gelled and flakey, worked just fine.   I wouldn't use the old dyes for precision dyeing like percentages or specific colours, but for a random dyeing experiment like this, they were fine.

50% alpaca/50% merino blend

Carol gave me a lovely bit of alpaca carded batt that she had gotten back from her processor as unsuitable for spinning.  However, it's lovely stuff and here I've blended with Merino to make a 50% Alpaca/50% Merino blend.   I just weighed out 10 g of alpaca and 10g of Merino and after 2 passes on the drum carder they were nicely blended and awesomely soft batts.  They spun like butter, save for an occasional little nep or fluffy bit.   This fibre is definitely a handspinners delight.   I had some natural black Merino in my stash, which wasn't actually black, but a dark brown and it fit perfectly with the brown Alpaca.

Kevin doing his annual autumnal plant inspection.

I have a lemon and a time tree which spend the summer out on the deck.   Sadly, the nights are cool enough now, that it was time to bring them back in.  Kevin always find some sort of interesting poking about when that happens.   The lime tree is a key lime and is loaded with fruit!   I sometimes wish I had  gotten a persian lime, because they are thornless and the key lime is quite spikey, but it also seems to be a prolific fruit bearer, so I can't really complain.   They lemon tree however, came with a notice that it would never be a tree, due to how they'd pruned it, so it is just a messy little thing.  It looks like someone just stuck a branch in the ground and it rooted, but it bears lemons and that in itself is pretty awesome.