Knit a Shrug on a Circular Knitting Machine

I’ve been having a lot of fun making projects on my circular knitting machine (which could also easily be done with hand knitting, of course!) and when I shared a collection of sweater scarf knitting patterns recently I wondered how I could make a similar project on my Sentro.

I didn’t have enough of the yarn I was working with to make a full-on sweater scarf that wraps around the body, but there was enough to make a shrug, and I think it’s really cute and I will wear it a lot this spring and summer over tank tops and summer dresses.

For those who do have circular knitting machines, you just knit tubes for the sleeves as long as you want them, and a flat panel for the back. For the shrug it’s basically the same length as my back from shoulder to shoulder, but if you wanted to make a sweater scarf (which I am still going to do at some point) you’d just keep knitting as long as you want until you can wrap it around your body.

The concept would be the same knitting it by hand, but you could more easily do it in one piece: work a sleeve in the round, bind off half the stitches when you have the length you need, then cast on stitches to the desired length of the back and work flat to the desired width, then bind off the bottom part of the back panel and cast on again to work in the round for the remaining sleeve.

If you want to check out more detailed instructions for how I made my circular knit shrug, you can find the pattern at Our Daily Craft.

Do you have a circular knitting machine? If you do and there are patterns you would like to see, let me know. It’s a fun challenge to work with knitting in a different way.

Circular Knitting Machine FAQs

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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