What a Mess!!!!

So Dena and I are chatting and browsing on Ravelry the other day and I showed her a shawl that a friend of mine from down under had made.  I say, I really like this little shawl and I want to make one just like it.

Thus begins another of our famous knit alongs.  It's not that we don't have enough knitting already, just that we keep finding things we love and want to knit.  Heck, it isn't even like we don't have three or four knit alongs going on already (Pine & Ivy, Tina's Sweater, Hedgehogs, Cambridge if I ever find yarn, etc)

So, our newest knit along shawl is called Sothia and the yarn recommended for it is Madeline Tosh Merino Light.  This yarn is all hand dyed and the colors are beyond lovely.  So we look around and find some online. I buy 5 hanks of this lovely coral color because we each need about 2 and a little.

It arrives in the mail and is even more lovely in person than it was on the screen.  The colors of this that you see on the screen vary from the palest peach to a deep orange and who knows if it's just difficult to photograph or it actually varies that much, but what we have here is lovely.

One hank must be wound into a ball and then divided into two equal sized portions.  You would think that would be easy.  You would be very wrong.  It took me over 2 hours just to wind it out of the hank and because of the level of difficulty, I then had to rewind the ball a bit looser and then divide it.  

This hank was a tangled mess!  

I go check on Ravelry and sure enough, in the comments on this yarn, there are dozens of complaints about how tangly and messed up the hanks are and how difficult it is to wind into either balls or cakes.  Madeline Tosh supposedly replaced yarn for a bunch of people, but that's hardly the point when you are trying to start a project.  And what if you are knitting under a deadline?  The color is nice, but frankly, the yarn just isn't all that and sure isn't worth two and a half (or more) hours per hank for ball winding.

So, Dena, here is your shawl kit.  I will try winding one more hank and see how that goes, hopefully better.  If they are all as tangled and messy as the first one, we may want to get a different yarn for this project.