Chicken Knitting Patterns

I visit Ravelry pretty often to see what new knitting patterns are being released, and a few times when I’ve visited recently it has shown me Annette Corsino‘s Emotional Support Chicken knitting pattern.

It’s a cute pattern worked in garter stitch with short rows to give it shape, and it uses worsted weight yarn in a few colors to add all the details. The project has been made more than 1,000 times, with people giving theirs fun names like Henriett, Iris Henfel and Henny Styles (the original was named Lindsay LoHEN). The pattern is a modification of one designed by Bev Galaskas and I think everyone probably needs one.

The pattern got me thinking about knit chickens, for emotional support or otherwise. If you want to start a fibery flock, check out these fun chicken knitting patterns.

Which Came First? is a delightful free Ravelry pattern from Dee Frey, which features an egg-shaped chicken that would be adorable as a springtime decoration. It can be worked in any gauge with any weight of yarn, so grab your odd balls and make a bunch of different sizes (note: cute Easter egg filler!).

If you’re looking for something a bit more realistic, Dot Pebbles Knits has a cute chicken knitting pattern that includes wings/frills. The project is worked flat and joined as you go for easy knitting and assembly.

If you have a circular knitting machine and a little bit of crochet skill, this pattern from Knetta’s Knits on Etsy is easy and cute. It includes a little knit nest, too.

Henrietta the little brown hen is another cute chicken knitting pattern you’ll find on Etsy from Knit for Victory. You probably have all the yarn you need for this little girl already (it calls for DK weight yarn but you can use what you have to make a different sized hen if you like) or you can buy a kit from the designer that includes everything you need to make your own Henrietta.

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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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