Knitting

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Dr Who ? Dr Unfair that’s who

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Dr who knitting fans have been in an uproar over their favorite Dr Who patterns being terminated off the internet. You could go see the (alleged) offending site but the patterns have now been removed.

it is not the first time free knitting patterns have been classed as ” In breech of copyright” and I am sure it won’t be the last.

Here are a few of the Newspaper articles on this topic.

You Will Obey BBC tells Knitters

The Sun – Dr Who Knitting Pattern Threat

BBC Unhappy over Dr Who Knitting Patterns

Dr Who Patterns Anger BBC

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Still want to knit up something that emanates  Dr Who ?

Check out these free patterns that still exist.

Knitted Jelly Baby

Dr Who Logos

Dr Who’s Scarf

Knitted Jelly baby

Comments

  2. as someone who lives with umpteen billion Dr Who figures and a fanatic husband (who use to put on Dr Who conventions in the 80’s)- I am sorta glad they shut it down otherwise I would be forced to learn to knit. My husband wanted and Ood and the Adipose. Ok, so maybe it was me who want the adipose SO CUTE LOL, but since I can’t really knit I’d be tortured trying to make one.

    Seriously though=it is a bit of a crock but these are trademarked images that BBC owns and technically she violated their copyright. Yes, she wasn’t selling them, but she couldn’t control who she gave them too and if THEY would sell them. In the US there is a fair use law that protects artists, so you can use some iconic images without fear of lawsuit, but not everything.

    IF R.T.D. and the BBC had been smart, they would have paid her for them and put out a book and made a fortune.

Have you read?

Knit a Leopard Print Shawl and Learn about Yarn Substitution

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]