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Fiber Factor Contestants Named

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fiber factor design contestA while back I told you about the Fiber Factor, a knitting design competition that will pit 12 designers against each other and the clock for a chance at a trip to Germany for the big winner.

The contestants were announced over the weekend, and it looks like a fun, diverse bunch. There are two guys among the 12, and the contestants range in age from 21 to 55. There are three New Yorkers, but the rest come from all over the country, which should be good fun.

The first challenge was announced this week as well. I don’t know how much the viewing public will be kept up on what’s going on behind the scenes, but I’ll bet at least some of these designers have blogs and will be talking about the process as they are able. The winner of each of the six challenges will win $500, so there’s a lot riding on the competition throughout.

I’m excited to see how it all turns out and will keep you posted on events as they unfold.

Comments

  1. It would be great if they had one link and we could keep up with all the contestants. I will try to ‘watch’ out for this. Going to mark my calendar for their first completed challenge..May 1.

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]