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Beam And Read – Awesome!

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I’ve had the opportunity to try out this light and peeps, It. Is. Awesome!!

Of course I’ve used the Beam and Read for my knitting, but also reading late at night and early morning. Then, just the other night, I grabbed it and took it out to the chicken coop when I heard some commotion out there.

The next time I went to use it, it wasn’t there, seems hubby decided it made a very nice addition to his “auto fixing arsenol”. Well, you’ll be happy to know that I’ve since re-claimed it.

My knitting kit includes the Denise cloth knitting needle case, which also has room for extra scissors, a tape measure, stitch and row markers, extra dpns, row counters, even a crochet hook.  And now… this Beam and Read light lives there too, part of my permanent collection (and safely hidden away from hubby, who has already asked if he can have his own!).

The Beam and Read is from ASF Lightware Solutions. It includes led lights that never run out, and runs on standard AA batteries. Awesome product, highly recommended, and now I’ll have to go find another one. You can get yours here: http://www.readinglight.com/or at Amazon (search for Beam and Read)

Comments

  1. “I’ve had the opportunity to try out this light and ladies, It. Is. Awesome!!”

    There are male knitters that read this blog.

  2. Ah… doesn’t it move up and down as you breathe? I think that would drive me nuts trying to keep focus. Or maybe not. Can someone that uses it address that? I’ll be on the lookout for one to try before I buy in the meantime. I’m ….er…. fluffy in the max and having it hit my tummy may also be a problem. Sigh.

    Edie

  3. I haven’t noticed it moving, Edie, and the strap is adjustable, so you can make it as long or short as you needed. I really love mine.

Have you read?

Knit a Leopard Print Shawl and Learn about Yarn Substitution

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]