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]

I rarely understand why something becomes a trend in crafting. Gnomes and geese are both cute I guess, but I never thought we’d be making them for all seasons. (See, for example, this collection of gnome knitting patterns, or these knit geese.)

Another one I don’t totally understand is sardines or little fish more generally. Sure, they’re cute, and the shape is fun, but I had no idea when I was sharing this pattern for a fish-shaped pouch last year that it would become a hugely popular pattern that people are still searching for on the site. It is pretty cute, though, so if you weren’t around then or don’t remember you should got check it out.

Recently another fishy knitting pattern crossed my monitor: the little knit fish from Classical Songbird Designs.

Just as the name suggests, these fish are little, about 4.5 inches or 11 cm from end to end. They look like little sardines and take about 12 yards of sock yarn to make.

You can even make a two-tone fish and use just 6 yards of each color.

This sounds to me like just about the perfect use for the yarn that’s left over after knitting a pair of socks, or a mini skein or several that have been sitting around unused in your stash.

The fish are knit flat in one piece, which makes it easy to stitch on the eyes with more yarn or embroidery floss before stuffing, and you can stitch up the sides while you stuff (though it’s not a very big piece so you could probably stitch and then stuff, finishing with the end of the tail).

Because I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one wondering, I measured an Altoids box and as the pattern is written the fish are a little too big to fit in it (the box is about 4 inches/10 cm long). But you could make the fish a little smaller if you want to make a box of them. Or just make a fishy bag to put them in!

You can grab the free pattern for the little knit fish at Classical Songbird Designs.

[Photo: Classical Songbird Designs.]

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