A Cabled Hat for the Whole Family

Now that it’s starting to get cool where I live, I’m thinking about knitting hats. Hats are a great extra layer when it’s cool in the morning that you can easily shed when it gets warm again later in the day, or keep them on all day.

The Raindrops on Waterlily hat from Tif Neilan is a cute cabled hat in child and adult sizes. It can be worked with two strands of fingering weight yarn held together for a watercolor effect, or with one strand of DK weight.

The pattern is $6 on Ravelry.

[Photo: Tif Neilan.]

If you’re a knitter who loves to create beautiful and intricate designs, then you’ll want to check out the wide variety of cable-styled knitting patterns available on Etsy. These patterns offer a range of designs, from simple twists to more complex and intricate patterns, that are perfect for creating beautiful and unique knitted items.

Etsy is home to many independent designers who offer their cable knit patterns for sale, which means you’ll find a wide range of styles and designs to choose from. You can find patterns for a variety of projects, including sweaters, scarves, hats, and even home decor items. From the classic Aran sweaters to the modern cabled accessories, there’s something for every knitter looking for cable-styled patterns. Check out these Cable Knit Patterns on Etsy

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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