Wishing and hoping.... and plotting and planning

I called Bendigo Woollen Mills about my order yesterday and they said it went in the mail on Tuesday so I'm hoping it turns up today. Aus Post says parcels from Bendigo to Brisbane should take 3 business days so it could be today.

When I was doing some stash diving for the blue stripy Booga bag the other day I found a bag of cream Cleckheaton 12 ply wool which I saved from a half-finished project someone gave me many years ago. I can't even remember what the original project was, but from the small amount I have, I think that either I lost some of the yarn, or it was originally intended to be a child's jumper. It's in a weight I don't tend to use and in a colour I'm not drawn to, so it's stayed in the stash.

I've been seeing a lot of beautiful hand-dyed yarn online recently and have wanted to give it a go for a little while. I got some good advice last week on starting with food dyes, and I think this small pile of 12 ply might be a good place to start experimenting. I weighed it all up last night and there's 350g. There is one lone ball still hanging on to its ball-band but the bad doesn't list a yardage. It's long discontinued so no readily available info online. I ended up doing a rough calculation by measuring how much yarn it took to wind once around a folder that was handy, and measured up the smallest of the little balls. 9 grams of yarn was just over 1000cm. All calculated up, the 350-ish grams of wool came to about 417m.

Now, what to do with it. I can't find any patterns I really like to make something for me. So the options are to put it aside for kiddy clothes for winter or to design my own shrug. What do you think, friendly commenters? Should my first foray into yarn dyeing lead into my first foray into designing?

Newsflash - the Bendigo yarn just turned up. Everyone here at work is laughing at my huge plastic postage bag full of yarn. (apologies for the bad photos - I only have my mobile phone here, and despite the fact that the manufacturer's documentation raves about the camera on this phone, it really takes crap photos)