Free Knitting Patterns: Ornaments for an Advent Calendar

Kat at Just Crafty Enough had a really fun idea for an advent calendar that she’s sharing with the rest of us. Instead of the traditional candy or toys to be unwrapped with each day’s reveal, hers has knit Christmas ornaments to put on the tree. Because it takes a while to fill up 24 spaces, she’s already started working on her ornaments, and is posting a new pattern each week.

I just caught the series now, in week four, where she presented really cute mini mittens embellished with a bit of stranded knitting. You can catch up with the other patterns there, as well as learn how she made her advent calendar (which involves embroidery and sewing and will take a fair piece longer than a week to make, but is lovely).

This is a great idea for building Christmas anticipation without giving the kids a piece of candy every day for the better part of a month, but even if you don’t do the advent calendar part you’ll have a great collection of knit things for the tree in the end.

[Photo by Just Crafty Enough.]

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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