The Ballad of Rose-Grey

There is an Alpaca Fleece that resides in my closet. It's not just any fleece, I have come to realize. It has amazing luster, about a 4" staple, and High crimp. Now, as I was discussinga christmas gift with the recipient, we came to the eventual topic of what colour it should be. The recipient doesn't spin, or knit, and has no idea how to do either, so naturally he knows nothing about alpacas. The conversation went something like this...

Me: So, what colour do you want?
R: I like blue.
Me: Alpacas come in twenty-two natural colours, but i'm pretty sure blue is not one of them.
R: well...
Me: how about grey? Black? Brown? Rose Grey?
R: ya, Rose Grey, that sounds good.
Me: You don't even know what it is.
R: Anyway, as I was saying before...

So I dug out the fleece, I hadn't done anything with it yet, and to date had been unaware of it's loveliness. I carded some of it, but since I happen to be very ill-prepared when it comes to fibre prep, I have to use dog slicker brushes. Christmas is solving this with a pair of Indigo Hound 5 Pitch combs, thankfully. I decided to try and retain as much lock formation as I could, so I did some serious flick carding.

Then I pulled it through one of those little nozzles you put on the end of icing bags, since I don't have a diz yet (shhh).

It hadn't been washed yet, and having been in contact with some icky fleeces, I had this irrational fear that maybe it wasn't rose grey, but actually just grey and the brown was just dirt...but I perservered and spun two bobbins full.

It came out about a worsted weight 2 ply. I skeined it over the arms of my rocking/spinning chair, as I do with all skeins. One wrap around the chair arms also happens to measure Exactly 4 feet, so it serves well as a temporary niddy-noddy. It was around midnight at the time, so I brought them downstairs to soak for a while, and went to start spinning Coda's hair. The whole process of washing ended about 1:30am, so I put them up to dry, and went to bed. In the morning they were still just a little damp, so I stuck them in the Dryer for a little. Here is the Yarn, all finished and pretty...

It's amazingly sproingy and soft and light, I am just in love with it, which brings us to a dillema. R, the non-spinning, non-knitting friend, probably won't appreciate the sproingy perfect-pliedness of it, will he? So it wouldn't be bad if maybe we didn't give him the yarn knit into a headband for christmas, would it? I know I spun it with christmas intent and a certain person in mind and blahblah, but it turned out much better than I expected. Decisions, Decisions.