Knitting

Free Patterns, Tutorials and Project Ideas

Giveaway: Knitting Daily Workshop DVDs

by

knitting daily dvd giveaway

Congratulations to Connie!

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been cleaning out my office and clearing out some old things that I don’t need any more, and passing on a lot of good, classic stuff to you.

This week I have two DVDs from the Knitting Daily Workshop collection, circa 2009.

“Introduction to Fair Isle: The Ivy League Vest” features Eunny Jang teaching how to work stranded knitting designs, use two colors at a time, add new colors, fix mistakes, work shaping in colorwork, make and cut a steek and successfully finish a project. It includes a free download (I just checked and it still works) of the Ivy League Vest pattern, which the 54 minute DVD walks you through.

“Classic to Creative Knit Cables” with Kathy Zimmerman takes you through the basics of cable knitting and covers all the techniques you need to knit two included patterns, a scarf and a sweater. This DVD is 65 minutes long.

I would guess these are region 1 DVDs, so you might not want to enter if you can’t watch those

Save

Comments

  5. Love cables and have
    been wanting to try Fair Isle..but…..FEAR! lol
    Thanks for the giveaway.

  7. Love Eunny Jung and cables are in my “to do technique” list for this year. Thanks!

  8. I would love to win these… I’m a good knitter, but have trouble teaching friends new skills. These would be fun for sharing in our knitting circle.

  13. I’m just starting to venture out of making just knit/purl scarves so these would be great.

  15. 1. A friend lent me the Cable DVD – and like the honest guy I am I gave it back. It was a wonderful DVD, great presentation and high video quality.

    2. Eunny Jang was always my favorite presenter on the show, and I’m sure the quality of this DVD will be as high as the other. I’d love to have these in my permanent collection.

    Thanks for the giveaway. KittenWhiplash on Ravelry.

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]