Check out the Pantone Colors for Spring ’15

I know, I know, we just started talking about knitting for fall and winter and now the “experts” want us to start thinking about spring? So it is in fashion, and with New York Fashion Week in full swing, Pantone has released its color report for spring 2015.

There are a lot of cool blues and greens in the collection, along with a cool pink called Strawberry Ice (if I had to guess, I’d say this one might be the color of the year). Tangerine is back as the big bright color of the season, while Toasted Almond, Glacier Gray and a rich red-brown called Marsala round out the palette with neutrals.

Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, said the colors are meant to be relaxing and encouraging people to unplug as they might when seeing these semi-tropical colors in nature. Sounds good to me.

I love gray as a neutral (and actually used a lot of it in my upcoming book, so trendy am I) and I’m a big fan of all those cool blues, too.

See anything you like that you might add to knitting or other craft projects? I’d love to hear about it.

[Photo via Pantone.]

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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