Holiday purchases and a question...

Last week we were indulging ourselves in some time spent in the middle of nowhere. We were staying in a remote part of Islay, Scotland and had a lovely relaxed time gazing at the scenery. I'm sure we'll have a couple more Photo Fridays for you to demonstrate just how beautiful it all was.

While we were there we found a delightful little craft shop. The lady who owned it was sat in the corner spinning and you could buy everything from skeins of her wool to fantastically knitted items. She had a local friend with a flock of alpacas and was lucky enough to have access to all the wool. I decided to buy a skein of the wonderfully soft hand-spun natural brown alpaca wool and am very much looking forward to finding a suitable project for it.

I love the variation in the natural colours.

Joe decided to go one step further though and asked if he could purchase some fleece. She clearly wasn't used to such a question but readily agreed to fill a bag for a couple of pounds. It turned out to be quite a bargain as Joe came away with 500g of the soft fleece. All he needs now is enough free evenings to get his spinning wheel out!

The fleece is unprepped - so comes complete with straw!

Also while we were on holiday I got on with knitting the sleeves for my cardigan. They are knitted on double pointed needles and the plain stocking stitch clearly shows my inexperience. I'm two thirds of the way through the first sleeve but finding that my tension goes awol in the gaps between each of the needles. I've realised that I was initially pulling the wool overly tight in these gaps and relaxing a bit has helped the problem massively, but its not gone away entirely. I'm wondering if I'm missing a trick or just need some more practise.

The laddering at the start was worst (and looks worse in real life than the picture).
It has improved from this but I have a way to go yet.

What do you think? Those of you familiar with this knitting technique do you have the same problem? Any clues as to how to solve this?