Where WERE you?!

Okay, okay, I dropped the ball, and didn't update for, like, EVER last week. But in my defense, I closed on a house, had a root canal, and had a pretty brutal fall (onto my heavy, solid, metal SEWING MACHINE), so my Wednesday to Friday was just wrecked.

Also, I haven't done anything on my current WIP, Jaina, so there's nothing to report there. I HAVE been working on a little design on the side, and hopefully that should be ready to show by the end of this week or early next week. Free pattern, whaaat?!

In other news, remember this?

I got a very nice comment from the designer on the FO post, which was awesome. I love seeing reactions from designers, both here and on Rav. If I ever publish designs there, I'll probably freak out any time someone knits one.

Okay, so now we're updated. Good for us. Hey, let me show you something:

THIS is a terrible image of some yarn I own. It's Jacques Cartier's Heavenly Alpaca, which is a Golden Crown Suri fiber. There are two kinds of alpacas, right? The first type, huacayas, are kind of your typical foofy llama dudes. My Jaina is made from huacaya fiber. Suris, aside from being the progeny of famous celebrity exes, are the alpacas that look like they have dreads. Here is a photo I shamelessly borrowed from the internets:

Hey there, little dude. I shall call you Fernando.

So although huacayas look foofy and soft, suris are actually softer, because the locks are silky. In fact, what you're seeing are gorgeous curls, not matted clumps, although it's hard to tell in photos. The alpaca wrangler cuts off those locks, they're cleaned, processed, and spun in some really nice fiber.

The yarn I showed above is made by Jacques Cartier, a company that is generally known for their qiviut. In fact, I made two shawls from that company's qiviut. Here's one:

The thing is, it's SO expensive. It's like $75 for one little weinery ball, which barely made the FO above. I mean, I got the yarn as a gift, and it's not the kind of thing I can go willy-nilly purchasing.

But the Cartier suri is less than 1/3 of the price. At my LYS, the same weinery little ball is $22.50. Okay, let's be honest: It's still expensive. I can buy some nice merino cobweb for a fraction of the cost, yeah yeah yeah. But the suri is beautiful. It's going to make an incredible gift, and the silkiness actually makes it seem a little more luxe than the qiviut, which is a little fuzzy.

So I guess what I'm trying to say here is, maybe you can't (or don't want to) afford the qiviut right away, but here's something I would consider to be a reasonable substitute without breaking the bank, robbing your family members, or needing a government bailout.

Anyone have experience with it?
- YX