Bust Your Stash with a Tumbling Blocks Afghan

It’s well know around these parts that I’m a sucker for knitting projects that are inspired by quilting (there’s a whole post full of quilt inspired knitting patterns you can check out for reference).

What I love even more? When knitting patterns that are inspired by quilts also lean into the scrappy nature of some quilt patterns to help you use your stash.

Of course the Tumbling Cubes Afghan from Lion Brand Yarn is designed to be used with their yarn (Vanna’s Choice, to be exact) you could also use whatever worsted weight yarn you have handy to make it your own.

Inspired by the tumbling blocks quilt pattern, this deign calls for 15 different colors of yarn, but for most of the colors a ball or less is needed, and you could always mix it up and use more colors as you like. Or you can keep colors in the same family as shown in the chart (so, like, all the greens are still green but you might use different shades of green for some of them) to help use up odd balls.

If you are using odd balls be aware that your finished blanket will need to be laundered according to the needs of the most finicky yarn you used. So if you have some wool in there, it will need hand washing. Stick to superwash wool, acrylic, cotton, etc., if you need it to be machine washable.

The pattern is charted and worked in stockinette stitch using the intarsia technique and with a striped garter stitch border that is worked one side at a time after the body of the throw is done.

The pattern is rated for intermediate knitters since you need to be comfortable reading a chart and working intarsia.

You can grab the free pattern from Lion Brand’s website. I don’t need another scrappy blanket project but I have to tell you I’m tempted by this one!

[Photo: Lion Brand 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]

Have you read?