Never buy Kauni

Knitting in colours is exiting and fun. Fair Isle, stranded, Mosaik, whatever. Very popular are those yarns that come with their own colouring built-in. One of those is Kauni Effektgarn. The special charme of this yarn is that the colour changes are fluid and very, very long. Ideal for larger projects like scarfs or pullovers. Knitting socks is no good with this yarn.

I made a scarf out of it. It is closely based on the 'geveldak scarf' by Nancy Marchant, which is featured in 'Knitting Brioche'.

As you can see, the beautiful colouring needs a lot of space to display its greatness.

But! And there is a huge But. Knitting with this yarn is no fun. For one thing, it is very rough, it snags on practically everything, including slightly roughened hands and bambus needles. Which is exhausting. Although the roughness does soften after a couple of washings.

The second negative point is that the thickness varies very much, too. In some places, it is very finely and neatly spun, in others, it is very rough and fluffy. And you can pull it apart rather easily, too. Try pulling Regia sock wool apart and compare it with this wool: you need a bit of strength to pull the Kauni apart, while it is virtually impossible to do with the Regia - you could probably use it to tow a car!

And for the piece of resistance: At one time the yarn snapped, and those guys from Kauni attached the next string back on again. Which does happen, I've had yarn like that before and it is a legitimate fix for a rather common occurrence. But not when the one end is a dark purple and the next a light blue!!!

And this is the reason why I'll never buy Kauni again. Colouring like that is really rare, though - as of yet I haven't found its equal. And I really adore that colouring. Maybe I'm going to dye something like that myself one day.