Del, Donovan & Fences

It became quite obvious yesterday that separating Del and Donovan from Ipo -- in fact from all of our female alpacas -- needs to happen fairly soon. The "little" boys just aren't as little as they once were. In fact, my fencing project for yesterday was to divide one of the sheds with cattle panel so we can separate Chloe, Percy, and Ipo from the not-quite weanling boys.

We started this morning by separating the boys from Georgia and Jubilee for an hour. After last year's experience with the stress of cold-turkey weaning, we decided to try a more gradual approach. For the moment, we're using a corridor area as our third pasture. The good news is that I was able to finish the braces and brace wires on the new Northeast pasture today. All that remains is to stretch the wire and hang the gate. My current goal is to have a new pasture by the end of the weekend.

I frogged my practice piece again yesterday -- that's what practice pieces are for isn't it? This time, I'm knitting a stockinette scarf with about 10 rows of K1-P1 ruffle at the end. I had some problems bringing the yarn to the front of the work for the purls and then moving it to the back of the work for the knits. I kept losing tension and I even dropped the yarn a few times. Is this normal for learning ruffles? Any suggestions?

Other than my difficulty with the ruffles, I think I might be starting to get the hang of stockinette stitch.

I'm still spinning Pinero's fleece and still making a little progress most days. I'm starting to want to work on something new. In fact, it was a beautiful day today and I could have done some carding if I'd had something ready to go.

On the spinning wheel: Pinero's fleece -- natural gray huacaya alpaca
On the knitting needles: A practice "scarf" in cheap acrylic
No other projects in progress.

Kim