Celebrating Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Knitting Legacy

Come Celebrate With Us at Village Knitters (click that link for more info….)

Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Knitting Legacy Aug 9, 1910 – Nov 30, 1999

100 Year anniversary!

August 9th – 6 to 9 pm! An evening of Demos, sharing EZ stories and trivia. Please wear your favorite EZ inspired garment to this event – we would all love to admire!

Demos include –

EPS (Elizabeth’s Percentage System) explained – a percentage method for designing one’s own sweater – seamlessly!,

A-B-C-SJ (Adult, Baby, Child’s Surprise Jacket) explained! – a garter stitch, reversible sweater with no side or armhole seams!,

KNITTING IN THE ROUND – seamlessly!, (I believe you are getting the picture here!)

CONTINENTAL KNITTING with two colors – in the Scandinavian tradition,

the famously applied I-CORD CAST-OFF including secret buttonholes – quite the finish,

AFTERTHOUGHT HEELS – literally!, and more.

Check out our class schedule for EZ inspired classes: Seamless Shoulder Shapings, Baby Surprise Jacket, Color Workshop, Going Seamless – Converting Flat patterns to Seamless Knits in the Round, Knitting Your First Basic Sweater,

Lastly – Pre-order your Elizabeth Zimmermann books at the Village Knitters for classes and your personal library and receive a signed bookplate from Meg Swansen (EZ’s brilliant daughter)!

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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