A Great Yarn

I'm making the Faroese hat I showed you yesterday out of stash yarn. The red is Dale of Norway's Heilo, and the gray is Sandnes Uldvarefabrik's Peer Gynt.

The Heilo is a good basic yarn, but the Peer Gynt is one of my favorite yarns on the market. It is not a particularly soft yarn, and at first glance there is nothing special about it. However, I think that the most important characteristic of a yarn is its ability to stand up to time. When I spend a month or more knitting a sweater, I want it to still look good several years down the road. This yarn passes that test. This ball is left over from a sweater I knit about 12 years ago. In spite of the fact that I wear that sweater all the time, it still looks new. That's something you can't say about most of the nice soft yarns that are on the market.