Last month, I reported that I had won a prize from Linda Marveng – consisting of my choice of four of Linda’s beautiful sweater designs and the yarn to knit it with, supplied by Hillesvåg Ullvarefabrikk. Today, the package arrived!

Can you tell how much I love it?

Winning the prize led to a massive dilemma over pattern, followed by an even bigger dilemma over colour. (You can see the four patterns on my post here.) I even put up a poll for readers to choose which sweater they thought I should knit. Here are the results (as of a month ago when I took this photo):

I have to tell you honestly that after many, many hours of discussion with Emma, I had already decided to Knit Caravay, shown below, whether or not it came out top of the poll. But it did in any case! (The decision was always between Caravay and Yaelle. I think Yaelle is the more interesting design. But as Emma said “it’s a striking design but it takes more work to style it right. Caravay you can throw on over anything and look gorgeous!”)

Choosing the colour was harder. We spent many hours looking at the colour tiles on the website. Then, we looked up the yarn on Ravelry. There are 1628 projects loaded on Ravelry which were made with this yarn. Emma and I looked at every single one (!), twice (!!), and ended up picking out four possibilities, before narrowing it down to Burgundy. I should add at this point that I am making this for Emma. If it were for me, I would have picked the Burgundy after 20 minutes thought. But Emma was initially drawn to greys or greens and it took a few weeks for her to decide on the red.

Emma, oh my god, you picked good!!!!!

The yarn is gorgeous and the red is so fantastic – rich, beautiful, colour-saturated, deep burgundy red. It really surpasses all of my expectations. Linda told me it was a good colour! She was right. You can see that the yarn arrived with a printed copy of the pattern, but Linda also gifted me with a digital copy on Ravelry. (As an aside, if you are interested in the hand knitted tank I am wearing in these photos, the pattern is Paid in Full, designed by Deb Hoss; I blogged about it here.)

One of the best parts about receiving yarn in the post is unwrapping it, and getting to feel the yarn. This is a brand new yarn to me, and it feels lovely. I can’t wait to start knitting.

We had a heat wave last week, but it has cooled down today. Not quite enough to model my latest project but I will try to do that later in the week. Keep safe everyone!