I was first made aware of Jonna Hietala’s stunning photography when she together with Sini Kramer founded and published the first issue of Laine Magazine, a knitting magazine representing and showcasing nothing we’d ever seen before!

A burning desire to translate what we see and feel into our own language.
We are born to create.

Now how’s that for a statement! No wonder Laine took the knitting world by storm back in 2016. Since then the magazine has become a leading voice in the industry, showing us a different way to express the love for our craft, offering new perspectives, and in my opinion this is much due to its photography and more specifically to how women and the female body is represented through this. To me, Jonna’s photography represents something truly unique, she skilfully captures some kind of emotion, or say “attitude” that sieves through her pictures. The magazine is currently in hiatus while the Laine team are focusing on new ideas and larger projects like their upcoming book 52 Weeks of Socks (which will go up for pre-order in our online shop February 3rd).

On a personal level I’ve always felt very connected to Jonna’s pictures. This might have something to do with our common nordic background, our Scandinavian influenced outlook on life, society and human relations. Because all this act in an emotional sphere it is hard to put a finger on and define, but there is something about the mood, the strong contrasts and the conscious use of darkness and shadows to create a visual setting just as much as the use of light that grasps me. Jonna’s imagery reminds me of home.

I’ve gotten to know Jonna through the last few years, and I knew she’d mentioned she wanted to do a photo shoot in London for quite some time – but I also knew that she is very sought after, the thing I didn’t knew was whether or not she would find my book project interesting. At the same time, for me, there were no other names on the list, I had to ask Jonna, curious to see if I was able to translate my project and communicate it, for Jonna to be as enthusiastic and ambitious about the project as I am. I was over the moon when Jonna came back to me not only accepting the job, but completely embracing the project as ours – I couldn’t have asked for more.

Yesterday we told you about our neighbourhood and what it means to us. I’ve tried to highlight how important it is to me that this book celebrates not only Knit with attitude but equally our community of makers and creatives, representing what ground us and what we do in our local surroundings but also in our wider world wide web communities. The fact that Jonna is onboard, to me, kind of brings all of these elements together, making sure we’ll reach our ambitions with beautiful aesthetics at the same time as staying true to who we are and what we want to communicate, both in the anniversary book but also on a day to day basis here in the shop.

Our crowd funding campaign is steadily growing – I think it is still possible to reach our goal within the deadline – but I do need your support as there is only 48 HOURS left! Now that more and more people are able to see our social media posts we’ve definitely reached more of a momentum in our campaign, we doubled the amount pledged in just a day and this is all thanks to your enthusiasm in helping me spread the word, I am so grateful to each and every one of you that have shared and commented on our posts as it has made a tremendous difference in our reach out! Please, do visit our Kickstarter Campaign and help us make this happen!