Hama pearls and plötulopi

The other day it was my mothers birthday and we decided to make our own birthdaycards for her. I´ve told you before that I really love making my own birthdaycards, but this time we wanted to do something very special and totally different. Inspired by all the wonderful Hama-pearls-projects on Pinterest we came up with this:

I made this one - a classic star from the beautiful icelandic patternbook

"Sjónabók"

Freyr (4 y.) made this pretty thing:
Bidenam (5 y.) made this free-style-Hama, I really don´t know why, but it´s a shoe :-) He thought a lot about the colour-combination!

Of course, we had a lot of fun, crafting together - but what I also liked about the Hama-pearls was, that it really helped my boy´s working on their patience!

We gave my mum/grandma this (among other things) mason-jar-crochet-candle-light, I used my own hand-dyed einband (blueberries)

At the moment I'm working a lot with plötulopi, or icelandic unspun wool from Ístex. The interesting thing about this material is, that it is so versatile. You can use as many threads as you want to: just one thread (single) and than you get a feather-light but at the same time very warm garment that you can wear underneath every jacket or coat. If you use two threads, your garment becomes similar to léttlopi (worsted weight), three threads are similar to Álafosslopi (bulky) or just as many as you want to, depending on your project... the fun thing is, that you get really interesting colour-combinations if you use thread in different colours - like in this hat:

7 threads of plötulopi and 1 thread of einband (lace) in 2 different colours - very warm, bulky and cozy and the colour is so very alive!

It has also been very popular to use one strand of plötulopi and einband (lace) together. I´ve never quite understood why that´s any different from using 2 strands of plötulopi or léttlopi - until now. I just finished my first project, using this yarn-combination and now I really do understand why it´s so popular - for many different reasons:

1. single, unspun plötulopi is very fragile while knitting and splits very easally. One thread of the much stronger einband (lace) solves the problem.

2. Using einband opens up endless possibilities in colour-combinations! This way I get the possibility to use my naturally-dyed einband, since I can´t dye the fragile plötulopi with plants like I did here:

1 thread light grey plötulopi and einband, dyed with rhubarb.

3. This yarn-combination is so much lighter than I thought - it´s nothing like léttlopi. It´s feather light, but at the same time very warm and will last for a long time because of the strong einband.

4. It has a wonderful texture... I just love it! It might even become my favorite plötulopi-yarn-combination!!