Knit a Field of Flowers in Your Knitting Projects

I know it’s said April showers bring May flowers, but we already have plenty of flowers in bloom where I live, and it’s got me in the mood to knit some projects with flowers on them. Or at least talk about knitting projects with flowers on them, LOL. Let’s take a look.

I love the bold, folk art flowers on the Harvest Flowers Sweater from Jessie Mead Designs. This project uses DK weight yarn and comes in nine sizes, with a fit range of 28 to 60 inches, or 71 to 152.5 cm. There’s 6-8 inches (15-20.5 cm) of ease built into the pattern, so the actual smallest finished circumference is 36 inches/91.5 cm. It uses four colors of yarn and has two chart options. The charts indicate where you should catch the long floats, which is super helpful for those with less colorwork knitting experience. Get the pattern on Ravelry.

Another pretty floral sweater is the appropriately named Rosie Sweater from LE KNIT by Lene Holme Samsøe. This one uses a lace and a fingering weight yarn held together to make a DK weight (you could also just use a DK weight if you don’t want to use a mohair carryalong). It has six size options, with an actual chest circumference ranging from 40.5 to 63 inches, or 103 to 160 cm. It’s meant to have 7.75 to 12.25 inches, or 20-32 cm of positive ease. This one is also on Ravelry.

Maybe you don’t feel like knitting a giant sweater right now (I know I don’t!). So how about a pretty floral cowl instead? This one, by Daphne Knits, is called the spring cowl, though you could make the flowers a different color if you want it to look a little less spring. You can make the pattern as a cowl, a double loop, a triple loop or a scarf. Either way it uses three colors of sock yarn and features a pretty lace edging.

I also love this floral patchwork knit blanket from Yarnspirations. The Meadow Mosaic Knit Blanket calls for seven colors of super bulky yarn, but you can use as many or as few as you like. The flowers are actually worked in duplicate stitch so this is an easy knit (but admittedly has a lot of finishing work). If you wanted to make a little less work, make the squares in panels instead of knitting each one individually, and don’t put flowers on all the patches.

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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