Blending the Suri Alpaca and Merino

I can't believe it has been a whole year since I combed the Suri alpaca and made a kind of a gradient with it.  I bought the merino I intended to buy to blend with it ages ago now but just procrastinated about it ever since but today is the day that I put my big girly pants on and deal with it.

The plan is to blend an equal amount of merino, made up of however many colours and blends of colours necessary to make it work, with an equal amount of Suri alpaca.  I will be making a 2-ply yarn so everything needs to be split into two equal amounts as well.  I will be using my trusty strong cardboard tube (was previously the inner off a large roll of Christmas wrapping paper, potentially a 25m roll which would need a sturdy inner, as opposed to a smaller 5m roll which usually just has a thin piece of card rolled in with the paper towards the centre of the roll).  I have made "stop ends" and a centre divider for roll by cutting large circles from a cardboard box and making a hole in the middle.  The fibre for each ply should fit on either side of the centre divider.

Using my trust blending hackle I started by taking the darkest alpaca fibre and the darkest of the merino and blending them.  The next one was a mix of the darkest alpaca fibre, the darkest merino and the next lighter shade of the merino.  I made my way through the alpaca and the merino, matching the colours/shades as best as I could, using a blend of 4 shades to where necessary to make a smoother transition on the gradient.

Top row: Merino shades Pearl and Chocolate.  Middle row: Merino shades Mink and Amber. 
Bottom row: The Suri Alpaca gradient and Merino shade Hazelnut

It took me a few hours of figuring out, deciding what to do, weighing out, a few "don't touch that", "don't move that" to the family, blending and dizzing off but I got there in the end.

There was one fibre nest on each side that I thought stood out a little too much from the others, maybe I put a little too much amber Merino in them, it seemed quite "yellow" compared to the others, but on examination its just that its not quite as blended in so should resolve at the spinning process.  Fingers crossed.