Great Ways to Stay Inspired in 2015, from Knitter’s Review

Clara Parkes has been a fixture in the knitting world for 14 years, giving the rest of us tons of great information about yarn, tools and the knitting life.

She said in a recent post that it’s easy to keep her job fun and inspired, and that there are five main things she does to keep the creative spark.

I’ll let her give you all the details, but this is a great collection of things to read, listen to and try.

I’m now in my eighth year of writing about knitting, and I know there’s so much more to learn and do and write about — and always will be more — than I can ever possibly cover. That’s overwhelming, but it can also be a lot of fun to dive in and explore whatever’s interesting me at the time.

I really want to get into podcasts this year because I know there’s some great conversations happening around them (and Clara offers links to a few in her post).

I’d love to hear what you do for inspiration, for your knitting or other creations.

[Photo via Knitter’s Review.]

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]

Have you read?