Duck, Duck Knitting Patterns

I feel like I’m seeing ducks (and geese, which we’ll get to soon) everywhere lately, so let’s take a look at some cute duck knitting patterns.

If you want a mallard duck, we have to start with the adorable (and adorably named) Beneduck Cumberquack, which is from Knit for Victory. You can buy just the pattern or the kit, which includes DK yarn, needles, stuffing, beads and thread for the eyes, and a button badge.

The baby duck from Polushkabunny has mallard coloration, and a super cute flower on its head. This one is worked flat using sport weight yarn, and is available for free (email signup required). The pattern includes video tutorials to help with finishing.

How about a duck that’s more like a rubber duckie? J.G. Miller has the Duck Ahoy Duckie, which uses DK weight yarn and was designed as a rubber duckie to hide on a cruise. It’s available as a free download on Ravelry.

Frankie Brown’s ducks are sort of an elevated rubber duckie, because there’s a little more shaping and it has wings. It kind of looks like a pigeon to me, but maybe that’s because I now have Bert and Ernie on the brain. This one can be made in different sizes depending on the yarn weight you use, and it’s a free Ravelry download.

Or there are more realistic looking little ducklings, like this pattern from the always adorable Dot pebbles Knits. This fluffy little duck is worked flat and has minimal seaming as the pieces are joined as you knit. They actually have another version, too, both of which are super cute.

And because I find it hard to resist patterns of ducks wearing clothes, I also have to share the Duckweed Duckling pattern from Huggable Bears. These ducks are worked flat using DK weight yarn and include lots of accessory options such as hats, overalls, a little dress and umbrellas.

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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