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Because I Needed Another Addiction!

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twilightcoverSo the folks at Random House thought I needed more knitting time. Ok, I’ll go with that, let’s see where that leads. That was a month or so ago, and 3.5 Audio Books! Not the little ones that resemble bed time stories, no! These ones are the full length novels. So far we’ve conquered Twilight, New Moon and 1/2 of the 3rd in the series, Eclipse. Also The Symbol.

Am I getting more knitting done? First lets consider that this is cold, snowy, sit by the woodstove and drink hot tea season. But, it’s also snowshoeing and skiing season, but yeah, I’d have to say that the verdict is positive. More knitting is being knit. Good, that!

These audio books are just as addictive as the original novels, but they don’t need to be held (or petted, or talked to, fed, or watered, or even taken outside). Just plug them into the computer, grab your needles and you’re good to go, or to sit, or whatever!

Comments

  1. I am presuming these audio books are the ones on cds? I use mine if I have trouble sleeping I plug them into my walkman headphones in and lay back and close my eyes – sometimes better than sleeping pills. Use the walkman on the train or bus to help pass the time. Many good ways to listen to them.

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]