Merinos, Alpacas and Cables

A few weeks ago I took a little field trip to BLISS RANCH in Loveland, Colorado. Carol Bliss is a rancher who raises Merinos and Alpacas. She has some amazing awards for her fleeces and I felt so fortunate that her ranch was only 30 minutes away.

I got to meet the animals and learn about the whole process from fur on the animal to scarf. Carol shaves the animals herself and then sends them off to a local spinnery to be spun into yarn. The thing that is amazing is that many times the wool from a single animal is kept together so when you buy a skeen it will tell you the name of the animal that donated it. I have some Vision Quest in my closet :D

I treid to get out of there without buying any yarn but yeah right! Here's what I ended up with.

This is a beautiful undyed natural sand colored Merino


This is that amazing Alpaca from Vision Quest


And this is a gorgous undyed natural chocolate Merino with white Suri Alpaca

There is so much movement in this one that I don't even know what to do with it yet.

However, I of course had to jump into it right away. I'd been wanting to try out cables for a while and this gorgous Merino was just begging for cables. So I watched one of those handy video's on KnittingHelp.com and worked out a design on some acrylic stash. Now of course I can't just read a pattern, I have to learn the hard way the no cables don't really pop in garder, they needto be stockinette. That if not broken up yes even stockinette with cables will roll up. So, I worked it all out and here's what I came up with:


No I created a little rib stitching at the ends so they wouldn't roll up.

However, as you can see it has the effect of one strand of the cable being cut off but not the other. To do again, I would do a single row of opposite stitching to deliniate an end to the cable and then do the rib stitching.

Right now it's blocking out on my ironing board and it soooooooo soft that it's hard not to touch. I just want to cuddle with it.