Brooklyn Tweed Fall ’14 Collection

The Brooklyn Tweed collection for fall is out, and it took fisherman knits as its inspiration but uses classic cables and chunky style in a whole new way.

Check out the lookbook for more information and eye candy (on location photography was done in Red Hook, Brooklyn).

I discovered flipping through the lookbook that I am in love with designer Julie Hoover, because I like every single thing she designed for this collection. Her wide cable and trinity stitch Tiller Scarf, at more than six feet long, is still almost as much commitment as a sweater but you could wear it every day. The Ludlow Stole, inspired by ganseys, uses textured stitches that come out with an almost woven look. And her Docklight pullover using fisherman’s rib and a bit of lace is lovely and cozy.

Véronik Avery is making me smile this time around, too, with Spinnaker, a classic V-neck pullover covered with forked cables that make the sweater look fitted though it isn’t. Her Wake is my kind of cabled sweater — a slouchy raglan with an asymmetrical hem and panels of V-shpaed cables on the front.

I also really like the Skiff hat by Jared Flood, which is a quick little cabled watchcap perfect for gift knitting. There’s also a stocking cap version so you can knit them for everyone without having it look too matchy.

See anything that catches your eye? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo via Brooklyn Tweed.]

Looking for knitting patterns for knitted Cardigans? Check out these Knitting patterns we found on Etsy.

Looking for pullover and sweater patterns? Check these books out.

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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