My sister-in-law in Cape May lives literally around the corner from Jersey Shore Alpacas and while I was visiting last year, I met Tish Carpinelli’s various alpacas, including Annabelle and Oliver, who were their first two crias and whom had been sheared earlier that season. The beautiful natural color of the yarn--creamy beige, rich medium brown--was easy to fall in love with. Plus, how many times do we knitters actually get to meet the animal from which the yarn comes! So I was thrilled and the yarn is very special. I originally bought 12 skeins of Annabelle, though, thinking it would be enough, and I took my time, almost a year, to figure out what I wanted to do with it. I finally settled on a medium size laprobe/throw that I could use at home, using the Mini Horseshoe Lace pattern from Claire Crompton’s The Kinitter’s Bible, casting on 181 stitches for the 6+1 pattern of varying yo and k2tog over two rows with a simple purl on the wrong side. It would also give me a chance to use circular needles for a large project--first time!

After six skeins, however, I realized--oops, going to need more yarn, and as it happened, luckily, Tish had six skeins of Oliver’s gorgeous yarn still in the shop, so improvising a bit with the design, in the end, we decided it was going to be a “buddy blanket”--nice warm throw made from sister-brother alpacas, with two panels of beige embracing a panel of brown in the middle.