17 Miles of French Knitting!

Ted Hannford’s story highlights the therapeutic benefits of knitting and the creative ways in which knitters can use their craft to make something truly unique. French knitting or spool knitting, as it is commonly known, is a technique that involves wrapping yarn around a small device with four nails on top, and repeatedly pulling the yarn through the loops to create a long chain of knitted fabric. The repetitive motion of French knitting can be very calming and meditative, making it a great activity for those who are looking for a way to relax and unwind.

The fact that Ted took up French knitting to use up his wife’s leftover yarn from making Fair Isle sweaters is a testament to the resourcefulness and creativity of knitters. Knitting can be a great way to repurpose old yarn and turn it into something new and beautiful. And while Ted’s 17-mile long piece of French knitting may be an extreme example, it serves as a reminder of the endless possibilities that knitting has to offer.

The Australian knitter who is trying to break Ted’s record highlights the competitive aspect of knitting and the determination of knitters to push their skills to the limit. It’s a friendly competition that brings knitters from around the world together in their shared love of the craft.

In summary, the story of Ted Hannford’s 17-mile long piece of French knitting showcases the therapeutic benefits of knitting, the creativity and resourcefulness of knitters and the friendly competition that brings knitters from around the world together.

Ted Hannford, who presently holds the record for the longest bit of knitting.

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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