Fading Fawn

One of my favorite colors for an alpaca is fading fawn. Fading fawn is when the alpaca is one shade of fawn at her top line, then fades to lighter colors throughout her side to her belly. Our own Tehya is a fading fawn. She goes from medium fawn at her top line, to light fawn and even beige by her belly.

What I love about the variated color, is to spin it with the different colors, making a variated yarn.

You could mix her blanket all together and make a solid color yarn. The color would be the middle color, as the lightest and darkest of the color mix together and balance each other out. But, to me that's not as fun to spin. I have some solid color alpacas and I do spin their solid color fiber into yarn, but the fun part to me is watching how the different colors combine.

This is Tehya's fiber, a bundle of medium fawn and a bundle of beige:



I make clouds with each color, careful not to mix the clouds (as that would end up completely mixing the color into an average color). Here is a cloud of the lighter beige color:



When I spin it into yarn, I grab clouds out of the bin in a random order. I may spin a cloud of light color, then a dark one or several light ones in a row. It's completely random, making the yarn completely unique.



I often take two strands of this yarn and ply them together for the finished product. This plying adds even more color and texture to the yarn. For this skein I am going to ply a strand of yarn from Tehya's fiber with a strand of yarn from Greyt's fiber (he is a medium rose grey). I will show pictures of that in a future blog post.