Review of Alegria Grande Yarn

Hey everyone, it's Deja from KnitAndCrochetEverAfter.com and today I'm going to talk about this Alegría Grande from Manos del Uruguay that I received from Fairmount Fiber store to review. I got this in the Acero colorway. I got to choose which colorway I wanted and loved the look of this. It just reminds me of like those pictures where you make it black and white and then I'm going to show you this worked up and caked up so you can see what you can do with it because it is one of those kind of strange variegated where it's got that one color kind of on the end, but it looks really beautiful. Okay, let me tell you some cool facts about this. This is a 75% superwash merino, 25% polyamide. It is so squishy soft. You can probably tell just from the video like how lofty it looks. It is so soft, I would use it for any kind of project because it is so soft, it's great against the skin, not a scratchy wool, straight up wool would be. It is worsted weight so it's great for knit or crochet. It has 197 yards, which also makes it great for knit or crochet, because that's enough yardage to really do a beanie with just one hank, get two and do a scarf, so it's got great yardage, so it's really good, you don't need a lot, you don't have to buy a ton of them on this project, so it's very cost effective when it has such high yardage. Care instructions, very important for me because I really am not a fan of hand washing. You can actually machine wash this. So machine or hand wash, you'll dry flat, so don't stick it in the dryer. But it is very easy care in that fact that you don't just, you know, I would still do like a delicate rinse, of course, but with a delicate wash in the washing machine, you don't want to stick it on, you know, bulky sheets or anything. But that's a great, um, another cool thing. about Manos del Uruguay, so this was sent to me by Bear Mountain Fibers, they are the North American distributor for Manos del Uruguay, but this actually comes from them, and it's made by local artisans that are in a cooperative, and they sign each hank, and when you buy these, this goes towards supporting the family of that artisan, so it's very personal, you You get to see who made that hank, who dyed that hank. It's really... feature of this yarn that you know that it's going towards something positive for somebody. It's really a good thing you're doing when you buy this yarn. The link to get to the yarn is in the description. They do, for Fairmount Fibers, they only ship to the U.S. and Canada, but I'm sure that you can, if you are not in the U.S. or Canada watching this, that you can also find a local distributor because it is part of the World Fair Trade Organization, so I'm sure that they ship all over the place. Okay, so all of that information is awesome, but I'm sure you want to know what is this going to look like. So variegated yarn can vary. So what I mean by that is that depending on how stuff is dyed, sometimes it can be a mess, how's it really going to look when you're actually making a project. So when you're doing variegated yarn, you have to be careful with the stitch pattern. Really swatch. Think about where the colors getting distributed because Certain stitch patterns just aren't going to look good. So I picked one I made a beanie to show you, but I picked one that I thought would show this off well. But let me show you this caked up first, okay? So here it is caked up, and you can see that this little blue here gets dispersed all the way around the cake. So you get a really good distribution of color actually from using it. So it's not like this is all going to be in one spot for the rest of the project. This is distributed everywhere. Short color runs. So that is where you need to really swatch the stitches that you're using when you have variegated yarn. Because of that short color run, it could get really muddled and funky. So definitely swatch if you are just starting with variegated yarn and try different stitch patterns before. Let me show you what I made up. I made a beanie with it and I chose a stitch pattern that showed off the blue really well. So let me show you. So here is the beanie. This stitch pattern and this pattern will be available if it's not all stitches or using slip stitches. So the stitches up are a couple of rows, so you can see kind of in the stitches. Slip stitches really bring and show it to just do like some knit stitching where it would only last maybe a couple of stitches before it switched back to the gray or the or the white. So I really like this stitch pattern for variegated yarn. It gives it a chance for those Again, you know, this is my personal thought, this variegated yarn, we recommend, it's a pattern that you love, they do have a ton of solid color, so show, so that you can.