Merino Bouclé: our pattern recommendations
La Bien Aimée Merino Bouclé is a brand new base that will add amazing texture to all your next projects! Aimée has wanted to add a beautiful Bouclé base to La Bien Aimée’s yarn repertoire for a long time, and she finally found this great quality base made of 100% Merino and is a Fingering weight. It is deliciously soft and wonderful to knit with. It keeps the speckles looking perfectly crisp and defined. Merino Bouclé will make even the simplest of patterns sing!
The first colors of Merino Bouclé released last week, and, over the next few weeks, we’ll release a lot of our other best-selling colors. We’ll be dyeing Merino Bouclé as a pre-order, so please allow us 2 to 3 weeks to have your yarn custom dyed after you have placed your order.
Aimée has been working on a Lento by Jonna Hietala using Merino Bouclé instead of Merino Singles, and held it together with Kumo, both in color Peach Sweater, her new favorite! Merino Bouclé and Kumo held together on a 6mm needle knits up at the exact same gauge as the yarn recommended in the pattern, but it creates a thicker fabric, that is equally light as a feather, and oh so soft! We can’t wait to show you this brand new addition to Aimée’s sweater collection… Jonna’s latest pattern, Seela, would work equally well for this mix of bases, and all pattern sale proceeds are donated to the Women’s Bank and used to support women’s occupational training and entrepreneurship in Africa and Asia.
While technically a Fingering weight, Merino Bouclé knits up thick and airy. You can easily substitute it for a DK or even a Worsted weight yarn. We have been swatching striping Bouclé and Corrie Worsted for another Piilo sweater, also a beautiful pattern by Jonna Hietala, and have been amazed by how well these two yarn bases work together. Merino Bouclé is such a versatile yarn that it can be substituted to a multitude of our other yarn bases and works so well on a whole range of gauges!
Photo credit: Laine Publishing
Catherine Clark, the owner of La Bien Aimée’s longtime stockist and wonderful yarn Shop, Brooklyn General Store, recently released a beautiful colorwork cowl using La Bien Aimée Merino Bouclé and we are just so excited about all the color possibilities! Marigold Skies features a lovely colorwork pattern that completely shines in Merino Bouclé and even better: this pattern only uses one skein of each color! Imagine the soft and fluffy cowl this yarn will create…
Photo credit: Catherine Clark
Espace Tricot also offers beautiful free sweater patterns that would be perfect knit up in Merino Bouclé, such as Calliope and Paloma. They are knit on a 4 and 4.5mm needle, which means you can hold Merino Bouclé on its own, or even pair it with a strand of Mohair Silk for even more yummy fluff!
Ranunculus by Midori Hirose or Love Note by Tin Can Knits would also be great projects to try out Merino Bouclé on. You could omit the lace pattern if you wanted to, as Merino Bouclé won’t offer great stitch definition for those lace sections… I also love the White Mountains sweater by Midori Hirose, and think it would be perfect in Bouclé!
Photo credit: Espace Tricot
Aimée’s next project will be a Felix cardigan by Amy Christoffers, using Merino Bouclé and Helix held together in the Yellow Brick Road colorway!
Need more ideas? How about Andrea Mowry’s Morning Rituals sweater? There are some amazing patterns on Ravelry that use different Bouclé bases too! Here are some of our other favorites: the Utu hat by Sari Nordlund, Krølle cardigan by Emily Greene, the Shako Bouclé hat by Camille Descoteaux and the Bomber Bouclé by Tricot design MCL.
So, please let us know! What will you knit in Merino Bouclé?
La Bien Aimée Merino Bouclé
Content: 100% Merino
200 m (218 yds) for 50g