This is my second project for the Will Work For Yarn group. This one was for zooner, from Great Lakes Pygora. She wanted it to use as a display piece for the fiber at shows. I loved working with the yarn, by the way! It has a beautiful halo, puts up with frogging better than expected, and is very squishy!

I received the yarn on 3/29, and I started winding the yarn almost immediately. Please note I don’t have a swift or ball winder! I started swatching on 4/4. After I asked, she told me it was up to me whether or not to add beads, but I felt like they were important to the pattern. Just for my own reference, they cost $8.37 total. Again, she didn’t ask for them, and I considered it for my own enjoyment, as well.

This took me much longer than it should have, due to choosing beads and mysteriously breaking needles. (Note to self: replace broken wooden needle tips for my Knit Picks interchangeables with nickel-plated ones! I like metal tips better, anyway.) It shouldn’t have taken me nearly so long to realize my left needle tip could be smaller than the right one, since I was knitting in the round. Plus, I did a lot of swatching. Thankfully, she was very patient with me.

I was behind on sending it to her, too, so I sent my husband to the post office and told him to do whatever he needed to do to get it there in the next three days (just in time for her first show of the year), and he had to buy something there to ship it in. It ended up costing $3.20, which wasn’t too bad in my opinion. I got over 300 yards of this gorgeous yarn for myself out of the deal, which is certainly worth much more than $3.20!

She let me know that she liked how it turned out, so I’m hoping to do more work for her in the future.

The pattern was lovely, as well. I went with the stockinette version (version A) because I felt like it showed off the yarn better, but the garter stitch would certainly be more practical for every day use. As usual, swatches are very helpful for making this decision, as I imagine some yarn might actually look better with version B.

I swatched with the Swarovski crystal beads that I ended up using for the beading pattern of version A and with some other, cheaper beads for the beading pattern of version B. It was generally agreed among my friends that the crystal beads were prettier, although some felt like the fact that version B had more beads was worth switching to the cheaper ones. In the end, though, I think having fewer beads showed off the yarn better, anyway, and using 300(!) beads might have been overwhelming either way, since they didn’t blend in the way they did in the sample shown in Knitty. And it would have taken longer to add that many beads. I’m not sure if you can really tell what the cheaper (but still pretty!) beads look like from the picture of the swatch.

Anyway, this is a very gratifying knit. It’s a fairly quick knit, with a simple feather and fan pattern, but it’s really gorgeous.