I acquired some Kauni yarn not quite a year ago. I’m thinking it’s aged approrpiately and is now time to knit something with it. The problem is that I don’t necessarily like the Kauni cardigan; and I haven’t found a project I want to even swatch yet.

This is colorway EF; which has dark blue, burgandy, dark green, medium purple, and so on. Most of the Kauni cardigans you see have the rainbow of colors in them with lots of yellow and reds and greens and blues and purples. You also use the same colorway, but shifting it so that you are always using a different color for background and foreground. I thought those colorways were a bit bright for my taste; so this is what I have (I also have another colorway which we’ll get into later).

I could use the yarn as most others have, and just shift the colors off by one or two; but the sweaters I’ve seen made this way with this colorway don’t have great contrast with each other. I could use a completely different colorway as the background; but the other one I have also has some blues in it, and I’d have to be careful to line up the color contrasts properly; and I’m not sure I’d like the two colorways combined.

My current thought is to knit some sort of fair isle-type pattern like a Dale pattern using the Kauni as the pattern yarn. I’ve done this for a baby sweater before using white and some koigu. (see blog post  here ) Worked great then – so I wonder if it would work for this. The problem is what to use as a contrast color?

From left to right, we have medium gray (the wrong weight, but you see the color); dark grey, black (heathered, but basically black), Cream, and White.

The black is too close in color to the dark parts of the yarn. When doing colorwork you have to make sure your background always contrasts with every color of the pattern yarn. The darker grey might work, but I think you’d lose the contrast with the dark blue; and it would be very very subtle. The light grey would work – but would the whole sweater feel too grey? The white contrasts well, but is very very bright; so not something I’d choose by choice as a background color (can you say “messy?”) The cream works well as a contrast to all the colors too.

For now this ball of yarn will live on my desk next to my computer until I decide to swatch or start a project.