Knitting

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Giveaway: Dress-to-Impress Knitted Scarves

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dress to impress knitted scarves giveawayThis week’s giveaway is for the girly girls, the ladies who love feminine fashion and a bit of a challenge or an interesting technique in their knitting projects.

Dress-to-Impress Knitted Scarves by Pam Powers offers 24 knit scarves, cowls, ascots, kerchiefs and other fun shapes, all with a creative touch. There are often multiple yarns, colors, stitch patterns and techniques in the same project, and she loves to pattern block a project (where one section in the center is worked in one style/yarn and the ends are worked in a different way).

The projects often have a layered look because of this, which gives you lots of options for how to wear them. These projects are unique and not like anything you’d be able to buy anywhere, but they’re also not for beginners. Of course if you love a design you’ll be more inspired to learn the techniques necessary to make it your own (and some of the special skills required are described in the book, too).

If you’d like to win a copy of this fun book, leave a comment on this post before the end of the day Monday, January 19. If you want, tell me what sort of style you like in neckwear the most: a simple rectangular scarf, a cowl, a small shawl wrapped around your neck? I love them all on different days, but I’ve been partial to a super long, warm scarf lately because it has been so cold!

Thanks for visiting and commenting, and good luck!

Comments

  1. I am a bit of a scarf slut – long scarves, short scarves, thin ones, fat ones, cowls and anything, which is why I would love to win this fabulous looking book to expand my collection o(and maybe e a few for other people if they’re very nice…)

  11. It all depends on the weather and that changes alot here in Canada but I love the short fancy ones the best

  12. My preference is for little neck warmers similar to the cover scarf. I have a super short torso and broad shoulders… I feel like adding the bulk of long, wrapped scarves makes me look dumpy.

  13. I love every type of scarf for different day different weather different occasion, as long as it’s pretty and keep me warm from the chilling weather.

  14. I love knitting and wearing cowls the most. They tend to provide maximum warmth with a shorter knit time. 😀

  17. I have been loom knitting scarves to earn a little extra money since I have only Social Security, but I would love to learn how to needle knit.

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]