A Story about Men Knitting That’s Not Hysterical

Most stories about men knitting are what we called in journalism school “hey, Martha” stories. (As in, hey, Martha, take a look at this funny story!) They expect readers to be shocked, and probably a little amused, that men would do such a traditionally feminine thing (forget for a minute that men were the original knitters).

This story from the Boston Globe is nice because it doesn’t take too much of that hysterical tone. It is about men taking up hobbies traditionally thought of as being more associated with women — and it’s funny that when women like to cook it’s considered normal, but when men do it’s worthy of a newspaper article — but it takes a different angle than a lot of stories of this sort do.

The reporter, James H. Burnett III, talks about how membership in traditional men’s clubs like the Elks has been in decline and that men are instead meeting in smaller, less organized groups to do things like cook, read and knit together. Which is kind of news, I guess.

I still want one of these stories, someday, to use the term “not your grandpa’s knitting.” Don’t ask me why.

[Photo by Matthew J. Lee/Boston Globe.]

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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