El Jorongo yarn

Ahh the 3 day weekend. Such a beautiful thing. The laundry is done, I've gone to the gym, ran my errands and now I can spend the rest of my Monday off listening to podcasts and knitting. Yay!

Anyway, so now I finally have some time to blog and can show pics of the yarn I received from El Jorongo the other day. This package came to my office.

Wow. That's a lot of yarn. So that night while watching the Olympics I set up the ball winder and put it together in several 50 yard balls. This is yarn from the Criollo sheep which are indigenous to Mexico and South America. I picked the natural undyed color because I wanted it to be really authentic and representative of where it came from and how it was made.

Yeah... Did I say it was a lot of yarn? Umm, yep, it's a lot of yarn. So I have to admit when I first got it, well, I kind of had some doubts. First of all, it just looked like so much, I saw all my stash reducing prospects go right out the window. But then when I balled it up I realized there really isn't that much of it. I figure there's between 1200 and 1500 yards, and it is pretty bulky stuff. But then I thought about it, knit a swatch, blocked it and really started to like it. While it's not the smooth, overly processed type of fiber we see here all the time, it is very warm and after blocking my swatch it is actually very soft and has a nice bit of fuzz to it.

And then I was actually happy because I realized I may actually already have a pattern picked for this yarn. It's funny because I've wanted to make this pattern each time I've looked at it I figured the yarn would be really expensive, so now it looks like since I already have the yarn I might actually be able to make this pattern after all.

This is The Einstein Coat, in Sally Melville's book The Knit Stitch. I've heard so many people rave about the pattern and the finished product, and it does look fun to do. I like complex knitting sometimes, but I also really love the mindless, garter stitch, relaxing listening to podcast, watching tv knitting too. So we'll see, I have the couple of projects I'm working on now, but once they're done there's a strong possibility this will be the next project on the needles.