Knitting

Free Patterns, Tutorials and Project Ideas

Knit a Heart-Shaped Washcloth

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how to knit a heart-shaped washclothI wanted to do a little pattern for Valentine’s Day, but I really don’t love making holiday themed things that you feel like you can’t or shouldn’t use the rest of the year.

A washcloth, though, can be used all the time, and it’s a sweet reminder for someone you love or for yourself, to give yourself a little love as you go through your daily routine.

This is a really quick and easy project, worked in Garter Stitch, with a little increasing, a little straight knitting and a little decreasing.

I happen to have a lot of red yarn, so I made mine red, but you can make your heart shaped washcloth whatever color you like.

What You’ll Need

Gauge is not important for this project, but I got about 5 stitches per inch/2.5 cm in Garter Stitch.

Finished cloth is about 7 inches (almost 18 cm) across at widest point and about 5.5 inches (about 14 cm) tall.

How to Knit a Heart Shaped Washcloth

Cast on 3 stitches.

Knit 1 row.

Knit in the front and back, knit 1, knit in the front and back. 5 stitches.

Knit 1 row.

Knit in the front and back of the first stitch, knit to last stitch, knit in front and back of last stitch.

Knit 1 row.

Repeat these 2 rows until you have 31 stitches.

Knit 10 rows straight. how to knit a heart-shaped washcloth

SSK, knit 13, k2tog.

Turn and work just these stitches. Knit across.

SSK, knit to last 2 stitches, k2tog.

Repeat these 2 rows until 2 stitches remain. Bind off.

Join yarn to remaining 16 stitches and work in the same manner, with decreases at each end of every other row, until 3 stitches remain.

SSK, Knit 1.

Bind off.

Weave in ends.

Add this project to your Ravelry queue.

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]