Free Easter Bunny Knitting Pattern

If you are looking for a small Easter bunny knitting pattern that feels sweet, classic, and nicely giftable, this one is worth a look. It is a soft toy-style design knitted in separate pieces, then sewn together, with a pink nose, folded ears, and a little pastel Easter egg to finish it off. The finished bunny is listed at around 12 cm tall, so it sits firmly in that quick seasonal project category.

What gives this pattern its charm is the extra detail. Rather than being a very plain bunny shape, it includes a rounded snout, tiny arms, a tail, folded ears with pink centres, and a knitted egg held between the paws. That gives it a more decorative, storybook sort of look, which makes it easy to imagine tucked into an Easter basket or sitting on a spring display shelf.

The pattern uses DK yarn in several colours, including white for the bunny, pink for the nose and ear detail, and contrast shades for the Easter egg, along with 3.25 mm needles, stuffing, and a sewing needle. It is one of those patterns that would also be handy for using up leftover yarn, especially if there are a few small balls hanging around from other projects.

Construction-wise, this is the kind of pattern that would suit knitters who do not mind assembling separate pieces. The body and head, arms, snout, tail, and ears are all worked individually and sewn together at the end, so it has more of a traditional toy-making feel than an all-in-one quick knit. CraftBits also notes simple shaping and secure assembly, and suggests embroidered facial features as the safest option if the toy is intended for a child.

This looks like a good fit for confident beginners or intermediate knitters, especially anyone who enjoys small toy patterns, Easter makes, or projects that can be personalised with colour. The pastel egg detail is especially cute because it gives plenty of room to change up the look with lilac, mint, lemon, or baby blue.

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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