Knitting

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Giveaway: Mini Skein Knits

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mini skein knits

Congratulations to Duane!

First off, let me say that June was spectacularly crazy for me, but things will be getting better after this week. So if you’ve won a giveaway and haven’t received your prize yet, or you’re wondering why I haven’t picked a winner in a while, please be patient and I promise I will get caught up very soon. Thanks! You all are the best!

One of the last things I did while I was still working at About Knitting was an article all about mini skeins. These little skeins of yarn include a small yardage but are rather irresistible because they often come in great colors or allow you the chance to sample a little yarn you might not be able to afford in larger quantity.

But the trouble with mini skeins is that you might end up wanting to buy a lot of them and not knowing quite what to do with them. They’re lovely as yarn art, of course, but wouldn’t it be better to use them?

That’s where the book Mini Skein Knits comes in (I reviewed it as part of the article linked above). The book has 25 patterns for accessories and home projects (as well as two lovely striped sweaters) that will help you use up leftover yarn or mini skeins (you can see the projects on Ravelry). It’s a fun and colorful book that’s sure to inspire you to use up your little bits, and I’m giving away a copy this week.

If you’d like a chance to win it, leave a comment on this post by the end of the day Sunday, July 10. I’d love to know if you buy mini skeins or if this is the first you have heard of them. If you do, do you use them?

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

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Comments

  1. I read something about them a while back. Haven’t seen them yet. Am interested in them and will look up more on them now.
    Thanks
    Sandi

  3. Thanks for the giveaway. I have not purchased mini skeins, but have a lot of yarn in my stash that I’m thinking of making into mini skeins by weight.

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]