Fall/Winter Collection from Bergere de France

It’s the time of year for new pattern collections and knitting magazines, and I’m going to share as many of them with you as I can because I know we all need some new things to knit.

Today it’s the catalog from Bergere de France, which has a whopping 159 designs for men, women, children and the home. The catalog itself cost $10 (or free if you’re a new customer) and comes with yarn samples, but you can also check out the look book (all 230 pages!) of browse the patterns online for plenty of wintertime inspiration.

There are lots of deep, chunky cables and classic colorwork in this collection. I love the Tar Tan Jacket, a ladies cardigan worked in four colors that’s as classic as it is beautiful. The Two-Way Sweater, which works as a top with a giant cowl or as a dress, looks warm and fuzzy and is actually easy to knit.

While there are a lot of classic designs here, you’ll also find some more modern choices like the fur stole and the cabled dolman sleeve cape. There are cropped sweaters for women and grandpa styles for men, as well as looks inspired by the ski slopes and weekend football games.

This collection will also get you geared up for next spring and summer, with cute tops in pastels, openwork sweaters perfect for the shore and easy tunics you’ll want to wear all season.

You can also deck out your favorite kiddos in woodland inspired knits (I’m pretty in love with the Crochet Over Dress, but not sure I have the chops for it). There are projects here inspired by the slopes and others that are perfect for outside play at school as well. And the baby rompers and jackets are just too cute to pass up. And that’s not even to mention the slippers, accessories, kits and more that are featured in this catalog.

When you look through the look book online, click on any picture to bring up the yarn needs and cost. (The whole pattern book is $20, which seems a great deal for the number of patterns involved.)

If you take a closer look, I’d love to know what catches your eye!

[Photo via Bergere de France.]

Specific to knitters, you can join our Knitting Patterns Only group to get, well, knitting patterns, ask questions and gain inspiration for what to knit next.

Looking for Yarn online? Check out Lionbrand our preferred source for purchasing yarn online.

Looking for Fall patterns to Knit? Check out these Fall knitting patterns we found on Etsy.

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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