Spinning licorice.

Thanks to some awesome people on Ravelry I was able to get my greedy little fingers on more fiber. I got two individual batts of alpaca and one lovely merino/silk blend. Silk, people! I've given that one a little test spin, but I can't quite get the hang of it. There's tiny bits in it that just mess me up and it's not the long continuous hank of fiber that a newbie like myself seems to need.
The first skein of alpaca, however, is already finished:

Hanks make every yarn prettier. I don't know why.

Spinning alpaca is, for lack of a better word, different. It's sort of smoother, yet harder to pull out. And once that yarn rips, connecting it back to your spinning is hard! If spinning was a candy store (spinners will agree that it elicits similar feelings of giddyness), then what I've spun so far would be candy cotton, but alpace feels like licorice. It's a bit rubbery, stretchy, but only to a certain point, and a bit of an aquired taste. That's my analogy and I'm sticking with it. Does licorice shed though? Probably not.

Oh, I almost forgot, the second colourful fiber has been spun up for a while as well, I just never got around to plying it. I feel about plying the same way a lot of knitters seem to feel about sewing sweaters together. I'm quite happy to have my singles lieing around in the closet for ages if it means I don't have to deal with the horror of plying. I imagine it'll be less tedious whenever I get a bigger spindle.

Two balls, both strands broke halfway and reconnecting them seemed like an impossible chore at the time.