Color Blocked Pocket Scarf Knitting Pattern

I love a good scarf. I have knit so many scarves (and cowls, and shawls) through the years I could probably wear a different one every day for a month. But there’s always room for more scarves, if you ask me. They make great gifts, or they’re an easy way to jazz up your own outfits when you hit that part of winter where even your favorite handknits are starting to feel a little drab.

This free scarf knitting pattern from The Underground Crafts amps up the fun by including color blocking. Half of the scarf is worked in one color and half in another. Which you can probably guess I’m going to say makes it perfect for using those odd balls in your stash that you aren’t sure what to do with.

It’s also a pocket scarf, which uses a bit more yarn but adds so much to the coziness of the scarf. It’s so great to be able to wrap a scarf around your neck and have a place to put your hands when you go on walks in the fall and winter. You can also put a little pack of tissues or other essentials in your pockets while you’re on the go.

The pattern also mentions this, but my first thought was that the pockets could be the alternate color, too. So in this case, the gray pocket on the peach half of the scarf and vice-versa. Just a way to add a little more whimsy! Or you could even use a third color for the pockets if you’re making this a stash busting project.

However you choose to make it, this pocket scarf is a quick and easy knit worked in cozy super bulky yarn. You can get the free pattern from The Underground Crafter.

[Photo: The Underground Crafter]

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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