Free Knitting Pattern for a Flying Witches Bookmark

Now here’s a Halloween project that’s equal parts whimsical and practical—the Free Knitting Pattern for a Flying Witches Bookmark. If you’re like me and can never have too many bookmarks tucked into your knitting books, novels, or even cookbooks, this one is a seasonal treat.

The design features a row of little witches flying across the night sky—perfectly captured in stitches. It’s a flat, quick-knit project, which makes it fantastic for using up leftover yarn scraps. Black, purple, orange, or even a pop of metallic silver or gold would really bring those broom-riders to life.

This is a great in-between project: when you don’t have time for a big knit but still want that satisfying finish, a bookmark like this ticks all the boxes. It would also make a sweet handmade gift for your book-loving friends around Halloween—pair it with a thriller or ghost story and you’ve got a thoughtful present.

Skill-wise, it leans toward the adventurous beginner or intermediate knitter, since it involves following a motif chart. But the project is small enough that you won’t feel overwhelmed. Plus, you’ll have a finished piece to show off before you know it.

All in all, the Flying Witches Bookmark is a quirky, fun Halloween knit that adds a dash of handmade magic to your reading routine. Small, stash-busting, and full of charm—what’s not to love?

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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