An Array of Knit Christmas Ornaments

I was sure this was going to be the year I was going to knit a bunch of Christmas ornaments. And I guess it still could be, but at the time of this writing I’ve only done one, a cute little snowman with a knit scarf.

But one of the things that’s fun about knitting your own Christmas ornaments is that most of them are really fast projects, so we all still have time to make some. They’re also great to use as gifts, or to decorate gift bags, or make a garland to hang somewhere that isn’t a tree. Go wild!

One of my favorite kinds of knit Christmas ornaments (though really I like them all) is the genre of knit balls. They’re so fun because you can make the same basic pattern look a bunch of different ways. I did this last year with knitting machine balls, but if you want to hand knit some check out this pattern from Bizzy Bee Patterns that includes a reindeer, snowman, bird, Santa and Christmas pudding design. They use DK weight yarn and would be a great way to use up some leftovers.

You can also use a simple textured stitch to make really lovely Christmas balls, like in this pattern from Gnomes All the Way. These use worsted weight yarn and simple stitch patterns to make really pretty knit Christmas ornaments perfect for the most traditional tree.

Another favored genre of knit ornaments is clothing, and Chatty Cathy Knitting has a great set of mini sweater Christmas tree ornaments with duplicate stitch charts to add designs to the fronts of the sweaters (you can also draw your own). These call for fingering weight yarn and just use a tiny bit so they’re a great stash buster.

Stockings are sort of clothing-adjacent, and this set of mini stocking ornaments from Warm And KnittedS also gives you options for colorwork and finishing. They can use any yarn you want but it sounds like the originals were made with sock yarn.

And if you want to add extra woodland cuteness to your tree, check out Amy Gaines’ winter animals amigurumi pattern set. This pattern includes a rabbit, deer, bear, fox and mouse, and each of them also has a little garter stitch scarf. So cute! They call for worsted weight yarn.

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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