Sheep Heid Hat - a Work in Progress

I loved the Sheep Heid hat the moment I saw it and decided that at some point I would make it.

However, I couldn't justify the cost of buying nine 50g balls of Jamieson & Smith Supreme Jumper Weight yarn at something like £6 a ball, however much I wanted to, and especially when the pattern said that no more than 25 metres of each colour was required (the Supreme Jumper Weight has 172 metres per 50g ball according to Ravelry).

Still, I looked every now and then on the pattern page on Ravelry and at the various versions that other people had made.  Some had used the J&S yarn, others had substituted, using different colours other than natural sheepy shades.  I ummed and ahhed about it for a bit longer and then I spotted a project where the knitter had spun up her own yarn, so I clicked on her project notes and discovered that Katie at Hilltop Cloud was selling packs 15g each of nine different British sheep prepared fleece, in very similar colours to the J&S Sheep Heid colours.  So I bought some and it worked out much cheaper (£8 + P&P).

I got spinning in December and soon I had nine mini-skeins, which sat in a bag until the New Year when they were washed, dried and wound into little balls:

Last Saturday I printed out the pattern, armed myself with appropriately-sized needles and cast on.

The first few rows were awkward, to say the least.  The ribbed cuff changes colour for the first few 'rounds', so I decided that I wouldn't worry about joining the stitches on those rounds until I got to sewing in the ends.

The day before yesterday I finished knitting the sheep and started the next part of the square pattern and am hoping to get onto the next part later today or tomorrow.

Progress pic:

I haven't done fairisle/stranded knitting for ages and ages and I had to tink back a couple of times because my stranding was too tight, even though I've been knitting it with the right side facing me (or dangling down inside the loop of my circular needle/inside-out) and I decided to keep my floats no more than three stitches long to help control the tension.  I think that once it's finished, washed and blocked it's going to look fine and the stitches will even out.

First I've got to finish the knitting and darn in the ends.

There are already a lot of ends:

 Sewing them in might be a job that takes up a whole day's worth of knitting time!