Knit a Little Doughnut, Because We All Need a Little Joy

I feel like the world is a little bit lacking in things to make us smile these days. With all the *gestures broadly* (I’m writing this a month ahead and I’m sure it will still feel like that) we could all just use a little joy.

In this case, a tiny amount of joy.

These little knit doughnuts — the official name is Tiny little doughnut — from Julie Williams were made to tuck into the pocket on a pair of overalls worn by a little bunny she designed. There are also little animals that can fit in the pocket, and she notes the doughnut is a bit of a snug fit but who even cares? It’s a tiny knit doughnut.

Even better this is a free knitting pattern available on Ravelry, so you can knit yourself a bunch of tiny doughnuts totally guilt free.

They call for fingering weight yarn, so you can call on all your sock yarn leftovers to make little doughnuts in all sorts of colors.

And if making the tiniest of the tiny knit doughnuts isn’t your goal, work them in whatever weight of yarn you want. There are no rules here. We’re knitting doughnuts.

And please don’t skimp on the embellishments for these tiny delights. Grab more yarn or embroidery floss to make sprinkles. Stitch on beads or sequins to be sprinkles. Make a tiny crochet chain and use it as a frosting embellishment.

I see doughnut keychains and zipper pulls and a dozen tiny doughnuts as play food for a little one in your life (skip the beads if they’re for a tiny human who might try to eat them). Someone once gave me a crocheted doughnut Christmas ornament; these would be great for that purpose, too.

What I’m saying is go wild. All I can do is share the pattern. What you do with it is up to you. Though I would love to hear about it if you make some wee doughnuts!

[Photo: Julie Williams]

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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