Knit a Cozy Vest for Fall

I have probably told you this before, but I spent a long time not being a vest person. But when fall hits where I live, that’s all I want to knit, and most of what I want to wear.

Lion Brand Yarn technically calls this one a cardigan, the McInness Cardigan, to be exact, but I just see a long vest that’s open at the front and perfect for all your fall activities.

Take one look at this thing and tell me you want to wear anything else at the pumpkin patch or going apple picking. I didn’t think so.

This is a really easy project, worked in one piece back and forth in rows from the bottom up. The front bands are integrated into the sweater so there’s no finishing there. The pieces are divided at the shoulder seams and worked in three parts separately (each of the fronts and the back). The pattern calls for binding off and then sewing the shoulder seams together, but you could also hold all the stitches and either do a three-needle bind off or graft the stitches together if you’d rather.

The collar is then picked up and knit from the top of the garment, and the armholes are edged with applied I-cord.

The pattern comes in six sizes, with a finished bust measurement ranging from 36 to 56 inches, or 91.5 to 142 cm. It isn’t meant to close in the front so you can choose the amount of ease that works for you to have a good fit across your back.

This looks like a great project for TV knitting or if you’re traveling or watching sports in person or at home. It’s pretty in a solid color as shown but would also be great with stripes or using a multicolored yarn. It’s a great blank canvas that you can make your own in lots of different ways.

You can grab the pattern as a free download from Lion Brand.

[Photo: Lion Brand Yarn.]

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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