Knit a Super Cozy Jacket with Simple Cables

When I’m looking around for patterns to share with you, I often leave myself notes so I remember what the pattern is like without having to click on the link. When I added the Honey Jacket by Anne Ventzel to my list of things I wanted to write about, all I wrote was “love this.”

Because I do. It’s such a pretty jacked and it looks super warm and cozy, and there are lot of variations to make if just the way you want. Let’s dive in.

First, the project is worked at a DK gauge achieved by holding three strands of lace weight yarn together, which includes a mohair yarn. You could of course use whatever single or multiple strands you like that allow you to get gauge.

The garment is worked seamlessly from the top down, starting with the back yoke and picking up stitches for the fronts. The pieces are joined after the armholes to work the rest of the body in one piece, after which stitches are picked up for the edging. Sleeves are worked in the round from the armhole down.

The pattern includes 8 sizes and 5 length options. The bust circumference ranges for 100 to 150 cm (that’s a little more than 39 to 59 inches) and within that range you can determine how much ease you would like. Given that this is a jacket that’s meant to be worn over other garments, you might choose a little more ease that you would otherwise, especially if you know what hole you want this to fill in your wardrobe.

Personally I’d probably end up wearing it over another sweater, but if you want to feel the fuzzy you can wear it over a T-shirt instead.

There are lots of great project photos on the project’s Ravelry page (including three versions knit by the designer) so you can see it in different colors, yarns and on different bodies. Check it out and grab a copy of the pattern on Ravelry.

[Photo: Anne Ventzel]

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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