Audiobook Review: The Yarn Whisperer: My Unexpected Life in Knitting by Clara Parkes

Listening to The Yarn Whisperer feels a bit like sitting down for tea with your favorite knitting friend—the one who can turn a tangle of yarn (or life) into something comforting and meaningful. Clara Parkes doesn’t just write about knitting; she speaks it, and hearing her tell her own stories brings a warmth and intimacy that the printed page can’t quite capture.

Her voice is calm, expressive, and familiar—like she’s reading aloud from her heart rather than a script. Each essay unfolds with gentle humor and insight, connecting everyday moments to the quiet rhythm of knitting. She talks about dropped stitches and lost love, about finding patience in fiber and peace in imperfection. There’s something wonderfully meditative about listening to her words while your hands are busy with your own project.

Unlike most craft books, this isn’t about patterns or technique—it’s about the soul of the knitter. Parkes explores how yarn connects us to memory, creativity, and resilience. Her phrasing and pacing are spot-on for audio; you can easily drift along with her storytelling while folding laundry, commuting, or settling into your favorite chair with needles in hand.

The production is clean and simple—no dramatics, no background distractions—just Parkes and her storytelling. It feels personal, genuine, and deeply human, like a one-on-one chat in the corner of a cozy yarn shop.

Verdict:
An audiobook that wraps around you like a hand-knit shawl—warm, thoughtful, and beautifully spoken. Ideal for knitters who love to pair storytelling with stitching.

5 out of 5 – The perfect companion for quiet evenings, long car rides, or hours lost in 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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