All About Substituting Yarns

Over on my blog, I wrote a post about substituting yarns and how to choose the best yarn for your project, and I thought it might be helpful for some of you.

There are all sorts of reasons you might not want to or be able to use the yarn used in a particular pattern. Maybe the yarn has been discontinued, or isn’t at a price point you can afford. Maybe you don’t like the colors or only want to buy from independent yarn makers or use yarn from your stash.

Whatever the reason you might want to choose a different yarn, if you haven’t substituted yarns before it can be hard to know where to start.

I look at the major considerations — weight, fiber content, and construction characteristics — to help you make smart decisions when you want to use a different yarn for a project.

What did I leave out? How do you go about choosing a different yarn for a project? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Generally I like knitting patterns where I feel like you can use whatever yarn you have (because my stash is big enough and I want to use it, thanks) and make a successful project. This is one of those times when a special yarn makes the process that much easier.

The Floral Bouquet Shawl from Xandy Peters uses a specific extended color pooling yarn from Feisty Fibers, which allows you to place the bobble flowers with increasing frequency as you knit the project.

It starts with a solid color yarn, then the two color yarn is added in, and you make a bobble whenever you encounter the color pops. This would be hard to replicate with other yarn that doesn’t have the extended color pooling built in.

The background of the shawl is ribbed, making the project reversible.

The shawl uses fingering/sock yarn and comes out to be an asymmetrical triangle that’s 54 inches/137 cm long and 36 inches/ 90 cm deep and 60 inches/150 cm across the top edge.

Xandy says the pattern is for intermediate to advanced knitters. Knowing how to work traditional bobbles would probably help, but there’s a great video tutorial for how to work the floral bobbles so you can practice on other yarn or even incorporate the bobbles into other projects.

The bobbles are five-petaled flowers but they also kind of look like starfish to me, which could be fun on a child’s cardigan or other pattern. They’d also be fun on the leg of a sock or around the brim of a hat for extra whimsy.

The pattern includes photo and video tutorials, and written and charted instructions. It also includes tips on what to look for if you choose to use different yarn for the project, and instructions on how to dye your own yarn to use in the project.

If you want to give it a try, you can find the pattern on Ravelry.

[Photo: Xandy Peters]

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