A Mesh Stitch Wrap to Wear in the Open Air

We finally got a little break in the super-hot weather where I live, and while it’s a little early to be expecting fall, it probably is time we can start thinking about some knitting that will help us transition into slightly cooler weather.

The Open Air Wrap from Purl Soho is just the sort of thing to get you into the next season in style. This mesh stitch rectangular wrap was originally designed by Whitney Van Nes but was updated to use a special new yarn by Hiromi Glover. The yarn is called Handwritten, and its a Japanese organic cotton laceweight ribbon yarn that comes in 26 colors. Each spool has 900 yards so you only need two of them to make the wrap.

Two strands of yarn are held together to knit this wrap, so you can play with two brightly contrasting colors of pick similar hues for a more organic look. Either way this is actually a pretty fast and easy project even worked on rather small size 4 US/3.5 mm knitting needles. (You’ll want double-pointed needles to make it easier to work the required number of stitches.

One thing that’s interesting about this pattern is that it’s a one-row repeat of yarn over increases and decreases, but instead of knit 2 togethers the decreases are purl 2 togethers. The pattern explains that this is actually easier to do and doesn’t have the tendency to bias like a fabric full of knit 2 togethers would.

If you haven’t worked a purl 2 together before you should practice on your swatch before starting the pattern.

The finished shawl is about 20.25 by 72 inches long after blocking. The cotton yarn and the lacy stitch make it lightweight and drapey but still able to add a bit of warmth to you outfits as the weather starts to cool.

You can get the free pattern from Purl Soho, and check out all the fun color combinations.

[Photo: Purl Soho]

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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