Camel, Alpaca and Romeldale

Can´t tell which is the camel, which the alpaca and which is the Romeldale

At last year´s Shepherd´s Harvest event in Minnesota, I picked up 4.2 ounces/120 grams of a roving made up of 1/3 camel, 1/3 alpaca and 1/3 Romeldale.  Romeldale is a breed of sheep created by crossing a Romney ram with a Rambouillet ewe.  They appear to come in all three of the colors in the roving so I don´t know which of the three colors it might be.

This roving had such a cloud-like feel, I knew it would be wonderful to spin; I was not disappointed.  It was an easy spin because I decided to allow the colors to blend rather than manipulate it.

The interesting effect of the color combination surprised and pleased me.  The roving was name Mocha Dream and it does look like coffee with cream.  The white/cream third of the blend all but disappeared during the spinning process.  After plying and putting it into a cake the yarn looked like this.

The weight of the yarn was somewhere between DK and worsted thus it produced about 100 yards.  The idea was to knit a warm toque for a man with this rather manly looking wool.

It was surprising difficult to find a pattern on Ravelry that was plain enough to suit my vision, but the Ribbed Watchman hat met my needs.  I followed the instructions using circular needles.  The end product looks like this:

This hat now lives with my brother, Tim, who says it will be sure to keep his head warm even during the coldest of winter days.  I love when going from roving to yarn to hat was so easy to do.  This was a truly winning project for me that took less than a week to complete from start to finish.