This Sweater makes me sad

To be clear, this is one of my favorite baby sweater patterns, I have made several, and have plans for another.  I love the kimono style wrap, which is very easy for dressing babies.

This was made with Baby Ull by Dale of Norway, now Dale Garn.  I have been knitting with this yarn for many many years, it is my favorite baby yarn that I have ever tried, and I have tried many.  The colors have always been so amazingly beautiful and rich, and the yarn is faithfully great quality.  Until recently.  I just heard that they had shifted production of their yarn from Norway to China a couple of years ago.  I have not made a ton of baby sweaters in that time.  Then I was working on this, the brown yarn and the blue yarn were the quality that I have come to expect from DoN.  Then, I was finishing this up last week for a gift, and decided that the lovely grayish purple would be the perfect 3rd color.  Knitting with it, I started to find slubs in the yarn and some poorly spun areas.  Not something that I had ever encountered with this yarn before.  When I looked at the ball bands, the brown and blue were from my older stash, and made in Norway, the Purple was from China; not the same quality.

I still love how the sweater came out.

Here is one that I made several years ago for my Niece Riley.  The colors make it feel so different.

Of course, I needed to make booties to go with this sweater.  This is a free pattern, Christine’s stay-on booties.  I have made these before, they are fun and look like little moon boots for those “Fred Flintstone” shaped newborn feet!

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To make matters worse, I recently read that DoN will no longer be selling to the US market.  I do have quite a stash of Baby Ull (for those few who have been privy to my Baby Ull hoarding), but lacking in a few of the neutrals.  I took care of part of that with a recent order to KidsKnits.

And while I was there, they had all of their DoN booklets on sale so, I added to my collection.

I must say that while these books are nice, they come nowhere near the level of sophistication and color work of the older booklets.  I am happy that I have many of the older ones in my library.

I think that i will stash up a bit more, and morn the loss of the beautiful designs and yarn.  I am hoping to find some North American yarns that can fill the void.