Knitting

Free Patterns, Tutorials and Project Ideas

A Google Story about Knitting

by

yarn mountainI don’t know how long this video has been out there, but I just saw it so I wanted to share it with you.

Google has a series of videos showing how different people use Google+, and one of them features yarn store owner Christina Blount Presnell, who hosts knit night via Google Hangouts. She’s used the Internet and Google+ to help build her yarn business, Yarn Mountain in Harrisonburg, Va., as well as building a community of knitters far beyond those who are close enough to visit her shop.

Go check out the video and add her or the shop to your circles, if you want. (You can find me over there, too, but I’ll admit I update rarely. Maybe when the book is done!)

Comments

  1. Sarah, Thank you for posting this mini-documentary. It was a very fun project to make and an exciting opportunity to work with the Google Creative Lab. This film was shot in May 2012 in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in and around the Yarn Mountain shop. The opening shot of yarn being spun was filmed at the Claudia Hand Painted Yarns studio, also located in Harrisonburg. The folks in the film are our actual customers, and they had a lot of fun being involved, too! Imagine my surprise when that phone call came, and the caller ID said “Google”. We were humbled that they asked us to be a part of this project and help bring the message of the capabilities of Google+ to other small business owners. We are very thrilled with the number of friends we’ve made around the world, yourself included. 🙂
    Cheers!
    Christina

Have you read?

Knit a Leopard Print Shawl and Learn about Yarn Substitution

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]