Who loves alpacas?!

Ever want to get your husband's attention? Tell him you want to buy an alpaca.

[source]

Long story short, I met a woman on the LA Yarn Crawl who owns 8 alpacas and she sells their fleece. My initial thought was, "I would love to have a herd of alpacas!". Turns out you don't even need to live on a farm to own alpacas - you can agist them at neighboring farms!

However, agistment is kinda pricey, and we don't live on a farm [yet]. So, I've decided to just buy a couple raw alapaca fleeces to process into roving and yarn. My friend, Beth, and I are going to try our hand at making our own drum carders so we can process the fleece quicker than using hand cards (which would take forevvvver with that much fiber). Then I'd love to try dying the white alpaca fibers with natural dyes, and eventually spin it into yarn. I have a drop spindle, but I have a feeling I'll be investing in a spinning wheel one of these days.

I'm going to buy one grey fleece and two white fleeces. Since I won't be buying an alapaca anytime soon, I've named the fleeces instead: Gandolf (the grey fleece), and Mary Kate and Ashley (the two white fleeces). I'm sure they'll keep me busy until I can someday have my very own alpacas. :)

Chicago Trip!

A couple weekends ago, Ryan and I ventured to Chicago for a quick trip for our friend's wedding [which was just beautiful!]. And while we were there, we got to stay with my sweet little sister and see my Dad for a day too!

After we arrived from our red-eye flight, we went straight to Andersonville once my Dad arrived and we got our fika.

 Naturally, we went to the Swedish American Bakery there for our fika. Back when I lived in Chicago, I lived in Andersonville, in walking distance to this bakery...dangerous!

 We got a marzipan frog, chocolate eclair, and some delicious almond tarts that I forgot to take a picture of.

 After our delicious fika, we walked around Andersonville for a while then went to Giordano's for lunch. We had to eat some Chicago pizza while we were there!

This crazy guy was very excited to try Giordano's.

 

And these crazy kids are getting married in less than two weeks!?!?! How is that possible?! My baby sister is all grown up. So excited to celebrate with them!

 And that was our weekend in a nutshell. Great times!

Yarn...and more yarn!

This may be last-minute, but better late than never! If you live in the Los Angeles area, you must go check out Itza Knitterie today before they close! It officially closes at the end of today (8pm I believe) and boy oh boy do they have some amazing deals going on.

See all this 100% Icelandic wool?! Each pack of 8 is $8 - only $1 per skein! It's the deal of a lifetime, folks.

Everything in the entire shop is 50% off, including these amazing handmade knitting needles in size US36! I've been wanting to make an oversize throw like this one for a while.

And I had to buy some of this baby llama yarn - so soft. I figured red and white are Scandinavian colors and I could make something Christmas-y with it.

I certainly have a lot of yarn right now. Many projects to come!