The great yarn give away vol. 1

We interrupt the regularly scheduled France revelry posting for this important message:

I have too damn much yarn and I'm giving a lot of it away.

The spring-ish weather last week got me cleaning and I unearthed my yarn stash in the process. I have decided that I am finally ready to part with some gorgeous yarn that I will never use.

First up:

The abandoned Norwegian sweater

What you see above is the yarn and bottom border for a sweater I intended to make for Brian before I found out that the man won't wear wool. Yes, I bought about $100 of Dale of Norway Heilo yarn to make my sweetie into a Sven-God but this was early in our relationship (we hadn't gone through a winter together yet) and I had not yet mastered his linguistic quirks. When interviewing him about a proposed sweater his only request was that it not be "picky." Now "picky" to me means a yarn that will produce fuzz balls easily so I thought this sturdy Norwegian wool would resist the urge to fuzz ball and be just the ticket. It was only a few months later that I received the translation from Wait-speak to English: "Picky" means "itchy." (I was also later to learn that the word "goosebumps" in Wait-speak is "duddlies," as in, "I can see you are cold because you have duddlies all over your arms." See how interesting life is when you are fluent in Wait-speak?) While I wouldn't define this wool as super scratchy, it isn't the yarn I'd choose for someone wary of the scratchy factor .

Once I found out he wouldn't wear the damn thing if I finished it, I stuffed the whole project into a Rubbermaid bin and hid it in the back of the closet I just cleaned out this weekend.

Here's a (lousy) picture of what the completed project should look like, except for the colors (where it is cream, I chose chocolate brown, where it is dark grey, I chose cream and there are little accent colors of green in there too).
The pattern is from the (now out of print it has been so damn long) Dale of Norway Pattern book #104. There is enough yarn to make a sweater for a biggish guy--I think this was sized in a Men's Medium since Norwegian sweater sizes are usually kind of out of whack on the large side (my mom once knit herself a Norwegian sweater that was supposed to be a Women's Medium and it would have fit a small elephant. And yes, her gauge was correct). That means there should be: 11 balls of the chocolate brown, 8 balls of the cream and 2 balls of the green.

That also means that there is plenty of yarn to make a number of the patterns in this book if you don't like the traditional one pictured above (though you may have to buy a couple of balls of an additional contrast color for some of them) including this:
or this:
or this:
Or you can just take the part I started and keep on knitting.

So anyone out there want the yarn and pattern book? I'd rather stay local since shipping it would be a hassle, but I'm happy to hear any enthusiasm for adoption of this poor abandoned yarn.