Knitting

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Giveaway: Geometric Knitting Patterns

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geometric knitting patterns

This one goes to Kitten with a Whiplash.

Playing with color in knitting is a lot of fun, whether you’re working simple stripe patterns into a design or using an allover geometric motif in multiple colors and textures.

Geometric Knitting Patterns by Tina Barrett includes charts for 750 different colorwork designs, from stripes and chevrons to plaids, tessellating patterns to designs inspired by nature, simple shapes and random designs.

There are a handful of actual projects in the book, but it’s really more about inspiring you to play with different designs, whether you add them to a plain sweater or stitch up a bunch of swatches and turn them into a colorful blanket.

This fun book is up for grabs this week; if you want a chance to win it leave a comment on this post before the end of the day Sunday, October 4. I’d love to know about your favorite color combinations. I’m a big fan of blues and greens but I’m trying to expand my color horizons!

Thanks for visiting, commenting and sharing, and good luck!

Comments

  2. This book looks like fun! I enjoy almost every color combination: reds and orange, blue and orange, red and black re some of my favorites.

  3. i love a ton of color combos but my favorite right now that I am finding myself working with is navy and cream and dark green or kahki green with a cream color.

  5. Although blue is my favorite color, and I do like tone on tone, I try to branch out in color combos. My last cardi was Dark Chocolate Brown, Mustard Yellow, Avocado Green and Rust. Sounded prettty tasty ’til the rust, didn’t it?

  6. I like navy and pink. But then I also like Yellow and navy. I think I am just a big fan of navy and other colors.

  7. Love doing color work though could use some new ideas. Love using purple , pink and blue or yellow though with a new grandson i think i need tovthink boy colors now.

  8. I knit a shawl in chocolate brown and seafoam green that’s pretty striking. I was aiming for teal when I dyed the yarn but the seafoam ended up working better than expected.

  10. Thanks for the giveaway.
    I”m loving Dark purple and Neon green, also gray, white and black with chartruese.

  14. I usually go for brown and cream or various shades of blue but am trying to experiment more using a touch of yellow or orange to bring warmth to my knits!

  15. My favorite color combination is purple with almost any or every other color. It just seems to go with everything 🙂 This book looks amazing with some really interesting designs and patterns. Thanks for another great giveaway!

  16. I like experimenting alll all different color combinations usually bright colors with some neutrals mixed in.

  17. I recently made a pink and black striped scarf for my daughter. I really love purples and greens or purples and blues together, though.

  20. Book of my dreams! So I am crossing my fingers, toes, arms, and legs. My favorite combos are pretty predictable New England–cranberry and cream and hunter green and ivory.

    from VT where the sun is trying to chase very persistent clouds away and losing the battle,
    the Vermonster

  21. I like greens and browns often with yellow and red. Together they remind me of fall foliage. I love playing with geometric patterns in my knitting.

  22. I have a lot of fav color combos. Ombres are always nice. But I also like grey with either pink or blue. And anything with black looks nice!

  25. This book looks great! I love brown and color combinations – like brown and chartreuse, brown and sky blue, brown and pink.

  30. Would love to have this for my library. I love playing with colour combos – no favourites at the moment but my usuals include at least one blue.

  31. I love, love pink & brown together. Otherwise, I dig the Japanese ability to mix disparate colors. Sometimes it even works for me.

  33. What a great book. I would like to delve into this type of knitting. I love bright colors. Hues of greens and blues. Or yellow, orange, and pink.

  35. Coral and turquoise! Try’em for a boost of color for Autumn…cool and warm, just like the weather.

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]