Knit a Hat with Stripes on Stripes

I love a good self-striping yarn. It’s an easy way to make a project look harder than it was, because all you have to do is keep knitting and you get these great color changes without any work on your part.

But did you know you can make self-striping yarns even more interesting by combining them? Using a couple of different colorways of self-striping yarn together can give you even more fun stripes, and the combination comes out looking a little more random because they aren’t colors that were planned to go together in the same skein.

That’s the idea behind the Stripes on Stripes Hat, designed by Lee Meredith and available on Knit Picks.

But to add to the mixed-up fun, you actually use two different colorways and start with the brim holding four stands of yarn together to make a super squishy and warm brim. Then the two strands of each color are separated and worked together so that you have a heavier hat than you otherwise would working with sock yarn.

The color you are working with changes every round, so you get these little mixed up stripes that are just so cute.

This would be a great way to use up some of your sock yarn scraps (even if they aren’t self-striping) and make a unique colorway that’s also a great way to use those little bits that are always left over after knitting a pair of socks!

You can download the free pattern from Knit Picks.

[Photo: Knit Picks.]

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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