Saturday, September 22, 2007

Kauni, deconstructed

I wound my Kauni today. I have heard quite a bit about how LONG the color runs are. Since I wound my yarn by HAND (it wasn't going to fit on the ball winder without breaks) I can tell you all about that. My hank was about 30" long, and weighed 250 grams, in colourway E-F. According to my math, this should be about 1000 meters. I went thru a green, plum, blue, and mauve color sequence TWICE-with maybe 15 yards back into the green. According to my guesstimations, one color in this 4 color sequence was about 59 loops (yes, I counted them. What else was I gonna do?) or roughly 100 yards. Including the color transitions, this works out about right. So each color swatch shown on Astrid's site displays the variances expected in a 125 gm quantity. Know it!

Yarnwise, it's semi-sheepy, and my hands feel softer for the handling. I am kind of glad I took all the time to wind it by hand, because I know EXACTLY what to expect when I knit it. I will probably knit the sleeves first, because I will engineer them. I can't stand mismatching sleeves. I may knit my fronts and backs together to the underarm, I haven't quite decided about that.

I am a little disappointed by how long the color runs ARE. That makes the entrelac layout a little difficult, because my pattern's not in the round. It should either match closely, or vary wildly at the fronts. Anything else is a cheesy look. I am trying to picture how far I would get if I knit this using 25 gram balls of fingering weight, because, in an odd way, that's exactly what I am working with. Winding this took a long time, but I've wound CTH BabyLoop before, and this was pretty straightforward.

If they ever have a colorway you like wound into 150 gram balls, buy it. The price is the same!

3 comments:

Robin said...

Thanks for the 411 on Kauni. You have a good deal of patience to do that by hand, but I agree with you on getting to know the yarn, super helpful.
Also I find myself craving potato chips.

junior_goddess said...

Ha-the bag and soda were there for purposes of scale. Don't make me tell your mama on you, Minnie!

Karen said...

This is what everyone is dying to know! i am still hemming and hawing about trying to get some of this yarn, since I have been burned more than once by colors that I did not get to actually see before purchase. I love the way the yarn works in the two "color" pattern, so I am toying with either trying to dye some (I have some directions that would probably work, but holy cow, what an effort!) or trying another yarn that might behave similarly. I will be watching your progress to see how things work for you. Thanks again for the information!