The Yarn Fairy doth cometh

Oh my goodness that yarn fairy got well mad at me the other day. She said to me “It’s all good and well telling people about the yarn that you got for your birthday but you kind of forgot about the other yarn I got for you.”

I was muchly embarrassed because she is of course correct.

She did get me yarn a while ago and I did forget to tell people about it.

Sorry yarn fairy.

So yeah as you might remember I was telling you that the yarn fairy takes many forms. In the fair month of March (I know I know I should have mentioned this before now) I received a package in the post from the far off isle of America and inside this package was all manner of excitement from my good friend Miss American Girl.

Taking centre stage of all this excitement was a gift from the yarn fairy. It just so happens that when American Girl and American Boy took a new year trip to South America, they bumped into the yarn fairy in Argentina of all places and she asked them if they’d send some special wool to me.

You know what they have in Argentina? Motherfreaking alpacas. And the yarn fairy had selected some special skeins of alpaca wool to be sent to me as soon as conveniently possible.

They were special for a couple of reasons – 1. They were from far away and 2. They were my first ever skeins of wool. Normally the wool I buy is some little acrylic number that’s been nicely wound and packaged up for me in a lovely factory somewhere and it has a label on it that tells me what it is. This was just a huge pile of soft squishy yarn.

I had no idea how you go about making a skein into a ball. I left it in a bag for a while in the hope that it would figure itself out but for some reason it just lay there being all....skeiny. Eventually, with some advice from Mooncalf, and the aid of two dining room chairs, I figured out how you wind yarn. Turns out that yarn fairy wanted me to work for my special yarn package. Winding wool is really hard when you’ve never done it before. The first skein took hours (yes really) and involved multiple temper tantrums and hissy fits and at least one unconquerable knot.

However as time got on I got to be a bit more of an expert at it and I soon had my time knocked down (but it wasn’t exactly quick, I must be missing a trick somewhere) and could do a ball without having a nervous breakdown, although it should be noted that you can develop a bit of a bad back standing over two chairs and winding up.

The pay off was more than splendiferous though and I now have some lovely jubbly alpaca wool just begging to be made into something. The only thing is...I have no idea what to do with it. It’s much thinner than anything I’ve worked with before. I’ve been a double knit baby up until now but a quick trip to my local yarn shop to compare with some of their balls has revealed to me that this yarn is like a 3ply. A.k.a. super fine.

I don’t think a blanket would really be suitable and anyway did I or did I not say that I wanted to branch out with my crocheting this year? (I did, for the record) So I’m currently looking for a project suitable for my alpaca wool – I’m thinking maybe a shawl of some description? Anyone got any thoughts?

So apologies yarn fairy for forgetting to tell people about my special Argentinian wool. Do you forgive me?