Check out What’s Popular in Knitting with the Stock(inette) Market

The Venn diagram on knitters and math and science geeks would show a lot of overlap, and when statistics lovers and knitters collide, awesome things can happen.

Like what, you ask? Like the Stock(inette) Market, an analysis of trends on Ravelry sorted by garment type, fabric type, yarn type, color and whether the item’s picture has a person in it. That link explains all the details, and here is the most current report. They cover two-week periods and the results are determined by collecting data on the “what’s hot” patterns on Ravelry twice daily.

It’s so fun to look at this and see what other people are knitting or at least looking at on Ravelry (this time of year, it’s lots of shawls and other things to wear about the neck and shoulders, as well as lots of lace).

This could be a cool tool for designers, too, though what’s presently popular doesn’t mean there won’t be different trends in the future. But it may tell you if you design lace shawls, you want to release a new pattern in the spring!

[Photo via Where the Red-Winged Blackbird Flies.]

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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