Knall!

A colleague of mine was cleaning out her attic and was about to throw out a couple of bags of yarns from the 1980s, which the name on the labels caused her to pause for a moment; it was Sandnes Peer Gynt yarn, and apparently she thought of me immediately (I love it that I'm apparently now associated with Peer Gynt in the minds of my colleagues in Nordic literature), and decided to ask if I had any use for it before she pitched it. Well, duh, of course I wanted free yarn, especially of that kind of high quality. We arranged a transfer at her office, and I've got it all safely home now.

My heart sank a little, though, when I saw the eleven skeins of the most garish cherry red you could ever imagine:

Anyone who knows me well knows that I have a deep, almost pathological aversion to precisely that kind of red. But since this is over 2000 meters of perfectly lovely yarn, clearly I'm going to need to look into options for dying it. I've been thinking maybe Kool-aid dying, perhaps using blue or purple to make some kind of purplish color...

Thankfully, there were also seven skeins of the basic creamy white, but unfortunately that is divided between two quite distinct dyelots:

and:

Since this is often used as a contrast color in stranded patterns, that's not really a problem. It will be fun trying to come up with projects for all this yarn. And if that weren't enough, there were also three unidentified skeins of what looks to be fingering weight wool in an extremely dark navy blue:

This is really appealing to me for some reason, though I have no idea what do do with it, or even how much there really is. Somehow it is shouting "garter stitch" at me.

All this added to the yarn I bought in Finland back in August means that I've suddenly got a really big stash to deal with. That's not really a problem, except that I seem to be knitting so slowly. The "Ung høst" pullover is taking forever. I'm a few inches into the raglan shaping, and the number of stitches in the round doesn't seem to be decreasing at all:

 
I had envisioned this as a quick project to get back into the swing of things, and it's been dragging on now for two months. There are just too many other things going on, I guess.