Alpaca Shawl - Design S207

I decided to make another shawl the same as the black and red Shetland wool shawl but this time using my own hand spun Alpaca.  This skein is 131g/288m of sport weight 100% Alpaca yarn and you can read about how I spun it here, its the very last skein at the bottom of the blog post.

I cast on on 20th April and finished on 25th April 2016.  It was rolling up on itself pretty bad.

I soaked it and pinned it out on my blocking boards and as it began to dry I noticed something that I didn't like, a definite line of change of colour right along the centre of the lace and then again, another shift in colour a little further up, right in the centre above the lace, just as I started the short row knitting.  There is nothing wrong with a variation of colour in a skein of natural coloured yarn, no animal is one exact shade of colour throughout, even human hair is more than one shade of colour naturally but it was more to do with the severity and placement of the colour shift. If the shift in colour had been very close to the point where the lace joins the main body of the shawl I would have been happy as that would have looked deliberate.  I decided that I didn't like it and would dye the finished shawl.  I dyed it using Greener Shades Dye, choosing the most natural colour that I could find in the recipe book and hoped for the best that it would at least hide the colour shift.

I think it turned out alright, it could have all gone terribly wrong, not only the dye job but the whole thing could have turned to felt during the dyeing process.  I think it looks like a natural colour of Alpaca, I've spun some this colour before.