Book Review: Happy Nordic Knits

Most of us who knit know that knitting is good for our mental health. Norwegian designer Une Cecilie Oksvold pairs knitting patterns with the story of her mental health journey and the ways that being in nature has helped her in the book Happy Nordic Knits.

Many of the knits in this collection come with a story of her struggles with anxiety and depression, things she tried that didn’t help and how embracing outdoor living did. Of course, if you’re going to be outside a lot in Norway, you need the right gear, so the book is full of cozy sweaters, felted items and accessories perfect for wearing when it’s cold outside.

The 23 patterns include 11 sweaters, all with some kind of colorwork, 3 pairs of mittens, a pair of slippers, a balaclava, headband, sitting pad, socks, hat, insoles and a neck warmer.

Most of the patterns include colorwork and several of them are also felted for extra warmth. The sweaters are often shown in multiple color options or sizes (10 sizes are offered for each pattern, and some are shown on both men and women) so you can get a sense of how they might look using your yarn.

I like the Leif Sweater, which has a large scale diamond pattern that’s vaguely southwestern and inspired by the interior of the author’s camper van and the Frostbite Sweater, which has most of its colorwork situated at the bottom of the body and sleeves. Despite my preference for projects that aren’t allover colorwork, the bold, graphic and colorful designs found here are a lot of fun, too.

A lot of the accessories are simple, such as the Bitter Cold set of balaclava, neckwarmer, headband and mittens, all worked in a single color and felted (there are felting instructions, as well as some other techniques, at the back of the book).

In addition to these projects to keep you super warm, there’s a section of “zero waste” projects made with yarn leftovers. These projects include stripey sweaters, a single color hat and neckwarmer, and felted insoles made out of a knit and felted rectangle cut to fit in your shoes.

The projects are colorful, fun to knit and to wear, and certain to keep you warm wherever your adventures take you. And if you like reading about how others have overcome hardship in their lives, the stories are good, too, but you can also skip them if you’re just here for the patterns.

About the book: 192 pages, paperback. Published 2025 by Quarry Books. Suggested retail price $26.99.

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations.

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind.

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca.

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl.

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions.

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic).

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only.

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns.

[Photo: Yarnspirations]

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