How Fast Can You Knit?

Can you knit it in time for this weekend? Depends on the project doesn’t it. If it’s a quick and easy thing, why not take advantage of the Spring Fever you’re feeling and cast on for yet one more “quick little project”. I won’t tell!

So, while going through my earrings this morning trying to decide what to wear, I found my gold heart earring. Perfect! Notice I said earring. As in singular. As in not 2, only 1. hmmmm, ok. Never being one to shy away from wearing two different types of earrings I dove right in. What in the world does this have to do with a knitting blog? Hold on, I’ll get there.

Looking through all of my online references trying to find a quick easy V. day project for you to knit up (preferably free, cause that’s how I roll…) I found this: And I think this is where my other earring went. Oh, wait, it was gold, not silver. Anyway, this would be a cute, quick and easy knit, and pair it with a charm (or single earring) and you’re good to go!

Here’s the link: http://www.coatsandclark.com/Crafts/Knitting/Projects/Seasonal/WM1082+Heart-Felt+Necklace.htm

Gotta go, have to find some red yarn and cast on…..

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]

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