Site content developing

I am taking a break with the blog to develop more content on the site and take care of all the new product descriptions.
Please visit www.maskaknits.com to see this seasons new knits.

New knits soon to arrive

End August the new knits will start dropping in! To start with it will be a dress in a great new zeeland extrafine wool, a turban hat and a scarf in a fantastic mouliné silk and wool yarn, a cardigan in a beautiful melange colour wool/cashmere yarn and a big cardigan also in a mouliné wool yarn. We'll add images soon so stay tuned!

Images from Pitti Filati, Florence

Starting with this breakfast, I was almost fainting from hunger already at eleven. Luckily I had the chance to get an early lunch.

Highly interesting yarns at japanese Eisaku Noro. All handknitters should look them up!

The local yarn and knitting industry introduced itself with this fantastic presentation on dolls.

Natural Fantasy is an amazing italian spinner that totally impressed me with their yarns and passion for what they do. Thir web page is a goldmine of information about many rare natural fibers, like cashmere, yak and camel. We will be using one of their yarns and hopefully many more in the future. 

At Baruffa I also found a very interesting yarn for a coming dress.

I also hade the pleasure of walking on their knitted floors.

FiloRocca is another favourite spinner that now belongs to the Grignasco group. I fell in love with their angora/wool mix.  We would really like to make something with angora sometime.

Pitti Filati visit

I went to visit Pitti Filati this week in Florence, Italy. This is the most important yarn show in Europe for knitting and hand knitting yarns and for me who hadn't been there before it was nothing but amazing. There were so many fabulous yarns and spinners to see and the outstanding quality of many of them was impressive. I learnt so much and I am sure this visit will make our yarn choices yet better. Because getting the right yarn for the right design is really the most challenging part of our job.

It is Maska's philosophy  that every design has one ideal yarn, and it is all about finding that very yarn. Or reversely, start with the yarn and then make the perfect design for it. 

I'll add pictures and more info later. It is now so hot here in Zürich it is hard to do anything at all.

Stockholm in knitted dresses

We had some really nice meetings in Stockholm last week. Two great but extraordinarily busy days, which Lisa demonstrates here while also showing coming dress Hanna.

Cecilia Blankens features us

Lisa and I just came home for our trip to Stockholm and were thrilled to see that Swedish fashion profile and stylist Cecilia Blankens featured us on her blog and also writes very nicely about us:

Here is a translation for those of you who don't read Swedish:

Today I met Lisa and Maria, two girls from Gothenburg, who went to school together and then decided to do something about their mutual passion for knitting by starting a company that sells high quality knitwear. You who already know me  know I am a cardigan-addict and the cardigans is the piece of clothing I use the most. 

It was wonderful indulging in The Perfect Cardigan-topic with these two initiated ladies. Lisa's and Maria's brand is called Maska and their niche is classic styles and colours.  The knits are made to last a long time, both in terms of quality and design and the cardigans are knitted in northen Europe with Italian yarns. The prices are kept at decent level by exclusively on-line sales on the Maska web page. 

I got so inspired and happy from meeting these fine entrepreneurs and can hardly wait until autumn when cardigan Eva in beige, that I totally fell in love with, is stocked again (currently sold out) so that I can "click it home".

Yes, bikinis are also knitted...

...so they deserve a post here. I find it so difficult finding a good bikini, that I actually wore one for eight (!) summers. Now I found some brands I like and can just hope they will be stocked in Sweden soon: French Naelie and Bronzette (good name) and Italian Pas pour tous. (Or should I dare an on-line purchase).

 

 Pas pour tous

Naelie

A post of gratitude dedicated to our pattern technician

Our prototype samples are so much better this round thanks to our fantastic garment technician Veronica.

Lisa and I met Veronica when we once went to a textile craft school in Gothenburg together.  Last season after a couple of rather disastrous samples (I might add an image sometime) and a frustrated supplier,  we made the wise decision to call her.

Here she is making measurement adjustments for the next samples.

Prototype samples arrived

The first four proto samples arrived!

Recent blog features

Thanks for featuring us on your beautiful blogs Rachel and Afton!

Choosing buttons

Exclusive buttons can make the most simple material garment look refined and elegant bringing it some kind of eternal value, in my opinion.

These shell buttons are made by a little German company that we currently buy all our buttons from. Browsing through the charts and trying them with the fabrics is a great part of the design process. 

Knitting tension tests

The product development for the new knits for autumn are progressing.  Here are the knitting tension test for the two dresses.

It is amazing how much just a little tension change creates a whole different fabric. Not to mention that knitted garments consists out of one single thread and that innumerable structures and stitches can be achieved with this thread. It is just one of the reasons why I love knitting.

Wool grading for the wools we use

Wool grading can be a bit confusing, but here is a guide to the wools that we use:

Super extra fine wool = Super 120's
Means the fiber is no more than 17,5 microns. (1 micron is 1/1000 000 m)

Extra fine wool = Super 100's
Means the fiber is no more than 18,5 microns.

Fine wool = Super 80's
Means the fiber is no more than 19,5 microns.

(To compare, human hair is about 100 microns.)

The finer the wool, the softer the feel. The super extra fine wool we use (on cardigan Mirja for example) truely feels like cotton. I'll add the wool grading to the Maska homepage as well later on.

Lisa in interior magazine "Vårt nya hem"

Check out the article about Lisa in the April issue of Swedish interior decoration magazine "Vårt nya hem". Love the picture of Lisa wearing cardigan Soraya. 

Click here to see the full size article.

At Idaplatz, Zürich

Off to dinner to favouite Zürich french restaurant Bei Babette wearing cardigan Charlotta.

Colour choosing

It's been great selecting colours for the coming collection because we now had many more yarns to choose from. (When we started our yarn sources were kind of limited.) Now it will be the colours we really long to wear.

Articles about Sandra Backlund

Here are three interesting articles about amazing knitwear designer/ artist Sandra Backlund.

In swedish in newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

In english in Dazed and Confused and on the website Sweden.se.

APC Madras finds

I bought got these two lovely summer pieces form the APC Madras collection.

I have for many years loved first the APC mail order and then their web shop and highly recommend it. I particularly suggest their woven garments since the are very well sewn with good fit, short stitches and quality accessories like mother-of pearl buttons. The knits however you should get from us...

Le fabuleux Marcel de Bruxelles

I bought a great top today and discovered the funny little Belgian brand Marcel de Bruxelles. Apparently a "Marcel" is belgian for t-shirt and they specialize in jersey and tricot tops "to make your upper body immortal".  (I can just hope that that is what our cardigans will do to you as well).

The styles are cool, the website interesting and the cotton quality is heavenly (the kind that you feel will last a 1000 washes). And not to mention the french-english copy...

Any country where they are not yet stocked should simply shape up!

I got this one in ministripes red and white...

...and am considering this effortless little dress as well. We'll see...

Fashion and knitting blog featuring us

Great blog, By Elin, featuring us. Very honoured since the writer is an experienced knitter. She has really good links to other knitting and fashion blogs as well and I found some interesting labels among them that I didn't know of before. Will get back and write about that later.