Saturday, April 05, 2008

Kauni and her friends

ETA: I get a lot of questions about the stitch pattern used in the sweater below. The link to the website is http://www.jessica-tromp.nl/. Unfortunately, the pattern has been removed from the website and is no longer available. I do not have access to the stitch pattern either. If you read the comments to this post, there is discussion about trying the get the pattern re-posted on the site. I hope it works out! However, I am not involved in the effort and have no more information than you, my dear readers. But feel free to continue the discussion in the comments if you wish!

* * *

Have you heard of Kauni? If you surf the knitting circles, I'm sure you have. Kauni is a Danish yarn with beautiful colors and wonderful color work patterns. Actually Kauni is the name of the designer, who is originally from Estonia. So the name actually means "beautiful". How appropriate! :) The Kauni yarns aren't really easy to find on this side of the pond, and I ordered mine from Astrid's Dutch Obsessions. Great prices and a very good color selection.

After I got my yarn, I had to start right away! But I didn't want to go with the popular Kauni cardigan pattern, because it has a very boxy shape and that just doesn't do for me. I immediately gain 50 pounds when I wear boxy sweaters... So I decided to go with Veronik's Colette pattern from IK winter 07. It's got nice shaping, and is a nicely constructed sweater, but I wasn't crazy about the cats, so I searched for another stitch pattern to use. There is a nice website full of free colorwork patterns here.


As much as I love knitting this, it is very slow, and requires a lot of concentration. I have been knitting on this exclusively for a couple of weeks, and I'm almost up to the arm holes now.


But I felt like I needed a break from all that concentration, and wanted something that was mindless stockinette that I could knit while reading or watching TV. So I started Salina, the sweater on the cover of Vintage Knits. I've been wanting to make this sweater for the longest time, and I'm really enjoying the pattern.
I've got this same yarn (Rowan Felted Tweed) in three different colors, so there might even be more than one Salina in my future.