Check out Knitrino and Knit with Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver just won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Demon Copperhead, but in addition to being an amazing writer she is also a knitter.

She recently released her first (that I know of, anyway) knitting pattern, designed with Andrea Cull, inspired by her book The Lacuna.

The Lacuna Mitts are long colorwork mitts worked from the bottom up, with a variety of colorwork motifs inspired by the book. The design uses six colors and there are two sizes available, with a change in needle size making the change in project size.

The pattern is available exclusively on the Knitrino app, a new app that aims to connect knitters with independent designers and make your knitting life a little easier.

The app is free to download (and when I did it gave me a hat pattern for free) and you buy patterns right inside the app. The projects are broken down step by step so it’s easy to track your progress. Patterns with charts can also be shown as text, and you can easily keep your place in the chart as you go. Another cool thing you can do is change the colors on the chart to match the colors you are knitting with rather than the ones the designer used.

Charts and patterns can also be sized to fit whatever device you’re using, and you can click in the pattern and add notes. You also have a personal pattern section where you can add photos, pattern notes, what size knitting needles you used, etc.

Knitrino is run by two knitting sisters, and as of this writing has 24 patterns available for purchase. The app says they will have new patterns monthly, and I’m sure there will be more as designers hear about it and want to have their designs offered there.

You can check out Knitrino on their website or download the app where you do that.

[Photo via Barbara Kingsolver on Facebook.]

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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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