Get Cozy with This Colorful Shawl Knitting Pattern

I know cozy is a word that we typically use to mean the feeling of wearing our favorite sweater or sitting and knitting in front of a fire. But the act of knitting can be cozy, too, when we’re in the groove or feeling confident in our skills, even when a project isn’t totally simple.

The Harvest Hues shawl from Tamy Gore is, I think, both kinds of cozy. It’s a top down shawl worked in three colors and it has lots of interesting bits for you. We’re talking two-color brioche, some easy eyelets, a bit of colorwork and some stripes.

None of it is super difficult, especially if you’ve done two-color brioche before, but it is satisfying, a way to use your skills without being overwhelming. You know, cozy.

And of course there’s nothing squishier than brioche knitting, especially in worsted weight yarn, which just ups the fluff factor. This is also a good sized triangle so it’ll be great to wrap yourself in warmth when the cold days come back (or if you live somewhere it’s cold right now, whichever).

(Side note: the yarn the designer used in her sample is a combination merino and Devon Zwartbles, which sounds like something out of Dr. Seuss, so I had to look it up. Turns out the Devon Zwartbles sheep is originally from the Netherlands, and it’s a brown sheep with a white blaze on its forehead and two white socks on their back legs, plus a little white on the end of their tails. It produces a “voluminous, bouncy yarn, according to John Arbon Textiles, which made the yarn. So now you know that, too.)

The pattern uses worsted weight yarn in three colors, and calls for a size 7 US or 4.5 mm circular knitting needle to accommodate all the stitches. You can download the pattern from Ravelry.

[Photo: Tamy Gore.]

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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