Drops Alpaca Review

When we closed NDS I was suddenly left without a yarn supply, which was the worst nightmare I could imagine as a designer,

I've always been able to dye the exact colour I needed to use, which made choosing colours easy.

I was left stranded without my colours and without my yarn, most of my indie dyer friends use my main supplier Chester Wool, so some of them have "my yarn". 

Sadly because they are indie dyers most of their colours are one-offs, so even though I can recommend them as dyer's they don't always have the colours I/you need

I have added them and their yarns to my "Recommended Yarns" page, so go and check them out if you want to buy an extra special skein/s to add to your collection.

(I will be adding more commercial yarns and indie dyers and their yarns to the list as I test them)

Anyway back to my worst nightmare.

Within day's of my worst nightmare coming true, I was offered the opportunity to solve it.

The lovely people from LoveCrochet.com asked me to work with them on some future projects, this meant I had a whole world of new yarns to discover and so my search for NDS replacements began.

Drops Alpaca is my first discovery.

It is at the budget end of the price range, and being used to only ever using luxury yarn I didn't really expect to like it very much.

So I started of with testing a couple of balls, using it with my NDS yarns in the book blanket I am working on at the moment.

I was completely shocked and surprised as to how nice it was and how well it worked with my NDS yarns.

And even better it came in a range of subtle colours, that would blend with my NDS colours.

As to be expected its not as soft as the luxury alpaca's, but its still soft and cuddly and has the tell tale fuzzy aura that makes alpaca special.

Its gentle on your hands and just generally lovely to work with.

Even though its a different yarn base you can use it as a replacement for the following NDS 4 ply yarns

Phoenix 4 ply (50% merino/50% silk), Angelus (70% Alpaca/20% silk/10% cashmere) Godiva HT (100% merino) and Godiva Silk. (70% merino/30% silk)

The above photo is of my Drops Alpaca colour wheel so far, I've only got 11 colours so I have one missing. 

My real only criticism is that the colour range is missing a proper green.

Obviously I will need to "test" a few more potentials to find the missing colour, maybe teal or dark turquoise which shouldn't be too much of a hardship for me :-)

Even better Drops Alpaca is on special offer at the moment (£1.85 for 50 gms, normal price £2.90 per 50 gms) which gives you the perfect time to stock up on lots and lots of lovely yarn.

Here is the list of colours in my wheel, starting with the dark blue at the top and working clockwise.

Dark Blue - 6790

Olive - 7233

Dark Lime - 2916

Goldenrod - 2923

Orange - 2915

Deep Pink - 2922

Pink - 2921

Dark Pink - 3770

Old Pink - 3800

Purple Violet - 4434

Grey Purple - 6347

John Arbon Textiles Mill Open Weekend

My freinds (and neighbours) John and Juliet are having a open weekend at their mill in South Molton next weekend.

There will be lots of lovely socks, yarn and fibre for sale, some of it on sale and tea and cakes and plus mill tours with the lovely John as the tour guide.
Daisy and I will be there at some time over the weekend, and at some point over the weekend its very possible we will be helping to sell yarn, that is if I can stop buying it all for myself long enough to sell it:-)

You can find all the details HERE on their website

Not a proper blog post this week

Sorry we've been so busy cleaning and decorating the dye room before we hand back the keys I haven't had much time to work on a proper blog post.
But I have added a couple of new pages, they both need lots more work, but both of them are a start.

I've added Choosing Colour
And Lynton Links

Hopefully lots more later :-)

Zodiac & swatching

A very short Instagram round up this week as I've already told you about Love Crochet and added the new Lynton Crochet Stroll page.

Last week was all about organising my new work schedule, working on the Zodiac and swatching new yarns.

I had planned to have the Zodiac club blankets finished by the spring, but as we are almost in May I am playing catch up, I've finished the may instalments for both blankets and are now working on June, I've joined the knitted motifs and hopefully will finish the crochet version this afternoon.
Phil has finished knitting the July motifs and is working on August, so I've almost caught him up :-)
Although by the time I finish July he will have finished knitting August and I will still be a month behind him.
But it won't take me long to catch up with him and then we will both only have 4 months left to knit/crochet, I've given us a deadline of finishing both blankets by August.
Below are some wip photo's which I've taken and posted to prove that I am still making blankets :-)

I've just realised if you don't know anything about the Zodiac blanket clubs you might be very confused :-)
The Zodiac mystery blanket club, runs throughout the whole of 2015, there are 2 versions, the knitted one knitted by my lovely husband Phil and a crochet version made by me.
At the end of the year members will have a knitted or crochet blanket, the design is based on the Zodiac and contains all 12 star sign constellations in roughly the right order revolving around the sun in the centre of the blanket.
I am planning a Zodiac page for the blog, but its still on my to do list along with several other pages.....maybe this week....

        

 

     

I've also been swatching my huge pile of sample yarns from Love Crochet

I need to remove and replace the recommended NDS yarns for my entire back catalogue of patterns, Love Crochet are supporting me by sending me samples to test as potential replacements.

As soon as I've finished I will be adding some yarn reviews on yet another new page :-)

    

We had a very busy weekend, we spent the whole of Saturday cleaning, de-constructing and decorating the dye studio. The top two photo's are of what its looked like full of yarn and the bottom is what it looked like after we had almost finished cleaning, de-constructing and decorating.

Next weekend we will tackle the dye room which is a much bigger job :-(

      

And yesterday was the first time in about 9 years we celebrated our wedding anniversary. 

We've always been at Wonderwool selling yarn but as NDS is sleeping at the moment we could finally enjoy the day without working.

We did celebrate our 25th anniversary four years ago, but it was a disastrous series of events, that ended up with Phil eating frozen pizza while I lay semi concious on the sofa recovering from food poisoning.

Next year is our 30th wedding anniversary, I really hope we can celebrate in style with all our family and friends, maybe even have a party.....