Knitting

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Giveaway: Mason-Dixon Knitting Audiobook

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mason-dixon knitting audiobook giveaway

Anne is our winner!

This week’s giveaway is brought to you by me cleaning my office. I have a copy (on CD) of Mason-Dixon Knitting Outside the Lines, by Kay Gardiner and Ann Shayne.

The thing about an audio knitting book is that it doesn’t contain the patterns from the book, but there are lots of little stories in the book that are here, and it’s read by the authors, which is a lot of fun.

The recording is on three CDs and runs three hours and 30 minutes. I’m pretty sure I only listened to it once, so it should be in really good condition. I don’t think the company that made it exists anymore.

If you’d like a chance to win this one, leave a comment on this post before the end of the day Sunday, October 2. I’d love to know which one of your far-flung friends you’d like to start a blog with. I’d pick my friend Jamie, who makes jewelry in Massachusetts, takes wonderful photographs and writes amazing poetry.

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

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Comments

  1. I would really like to have this,i’ve done crafts all my life like my mom and grandma before her. The blog i would like to start is with my niece Lindsey who also does a lot of crafting. I live half a continent away from her but still feel a strong connection with her and her 6 kids. Thanks for the consideration

  2. I have never had any desire to start a blog, but I do love listening to audio books as I knit!
    lindarumsey on Ravelry

  4. I listen to audiobooks as I fly to various knitting events. A book of knitting stories would be fun to listen to on the way. I might enjoy doing a blog with my youngest daughter.

  7. I would start a blog with my dear friend Paul where we would mock our mutual conservative upbringing. I’d love to win the audiobook!

  8. My best friend is one of the best knitters I know. She is constantly knitting up her unique back zippered baby jackets: every grandchild of her friends and every child born to one of her coworkers has received a Jenn Jacket as a gift. I’d love to win this for her so she could have it to listen to when driving the 9 hrs to visit her grandchildren!

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]