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In Case Anyone Was Wondering What I Want for Mother’s Day

by

jimmy beans yarn flowersJimmy Beans Wool has a knack for coming up with really awesome stuff, and I think their gift idea for Mother’s Day is awesome.

These limited edition yarn bouquets go on sale on Friday (April 19) and I’ll bet they’ll go fast.

According to a press release sent to CGHQ, here’s what these cool gifts offer:

Full Bouquet – $200 (only 60 available) Contains:

One skein of each of the following exclusive hand dyed yarns:

  • Artyarns Beaded Silk Light – Wildflowers
  • Koigu KPPPM
  • Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock – Bukiety
  • Madelinetosh Tosh Merino Light
  • Malabrigo Worsted Merino
  • TSCArtyarns Zara Hand-Dyed
  • Fleece Artist Woolie Silk – Peach Blossom

Needles in US sizes 6, 7, 8 and 9
Two 20g tubes of Miyuki clear glass beads size 6/0 that can be used for the April Showers Capelet pattern
A postcard with a link to PDFs of seven exclusive patterns including:

  1. Wildflowers Mother’s Day Shawl designed by Iris Schreier
  2. 3 Knit Flowers designed by Maie Landra
  3. A Day At The Vineyards Mitts (elbow-length mitts) designed by Suzy Allen (note: requires US 5-8″ circ and/or US 5 DPNs, not included in bouquet)
  4. Angel Lady Scarf designed by Suzy Allen (note: requires US 5-16″ circular or US 5 straight needles, not included in bouquet)
  5. Hat designed by Romi Hill
  6. Rose Garden Crescent Scarf designed by Iris Schreier
  7. April Showers Capelet designed by Lynette Meek (note: requires US 8-32″ circular, US 8 DPNs, 0.6mm crochet hook for beading, not included in bouquet)

small yarn flower jimmy beans wool

Simple Bouquet – $60 (only 100 available) Contains:

One skein of each of the following exclusive hand dyed yarns:

  • Koigu KPPPM
  • Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock – Bukiety
  • Madelinetosh Tosh Merino Light

Needles in US sizes 2, 3 and 4

Access to patterns using the yarns included in the bouquet

How much fun would that be to give or to get?

 

Comments

  1. I’d give birth to get a cool Mother’s Day bouquet like that. :). Always tell my husband to not buy me flowers that die, I’d rather buy a nice pan. Now I can say I’d rather have a yarn arrangement .

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]