Knit a Chicken for Your Eggs

Knitting can’t solve the age-old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, but now, thanks to Yarnspirations, you can knit a little chicken to keep your egg cozy.

The chicken toy and egg cozy pattern from Yarnspirations uses Red Heart Super Saver yarn, or you can use scraps of whatever medium/worsted weight yarn you have on hand. Theirs are in rather traditional chicken colors but you can make yours whatever colors you like, of course.

You have the option of stuffing your chicken and sewing up the bottom to make it a chicken toy, or leaving it open so that it can be an egg cozy (for a real egg or a candy egg, or maybe even a chocolate orange, though you might need to use bigger yarn to make that fit properly).

Use a little bit of black yarn to make the eyes or leave eyes off if this is going to be a toy that little kids will play with. For older kids or just for whimsy you can add safety eyes, sew on buttons or whatever you like.

Head to Yarnspirations to grab this free chicken knitting pattern.

And while we’re on the subject of knitting chickens, I feel like this is still a thing that a lot of people are doing. The Emotional Support Chicken (which is part of this collection of amigurumi knitting patterns worked in worsted weight yarn) is still going strong.

A couple of years ago I also did a full post of chicken knitting patterns, which also includes that pattern. Here you’ll find egg-shaped chickens, a chicken with a nest and more fun patterns so you can knit yourself a whole flock of fibery chickens.

These are fun gifts for people who like chickens or just as a silly little thing to make and share, because we all need silly little things, right?

[Photo: Yarnspirations]

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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