Knit a Super Cozy Triangular Shawl

There’s so much to love about the Lilitha shawl pattern from Bigger than Life Knits. It’s a little asymmetrical triangle, which is probably the easiest kind of triangle to wear. There’s not a lot of excess fabric and you can almost wear it like a scarf to keep you warm.

And this one definitely will keep you warm. It’s worked with a superfine yarn combined with mohair, making a weight like a DK weight. The mohair gives it a fuzzy texture that’s nice and warm, though of course you can also just knit with a DK weight yarn of your choice if you’d rather.

The majority of the shawl is stockinette stitch, but the long lower edge of the triangle has a lace edging that almost looks like hearts stacked on each other.

You can get the pattern from Noma Ndlovu aka Bigger than Life Hand Knits, on Ravelry.

Speaking of how to wear shawls, though, I was looking back at some old posts about triangular shawls and I found one with a dead link that was about how to style triangular scarves.

While this is more of an issue when you have a really large triangle (or a large shawl of any shape, really) it’s good to think about the different ways you could wear a shawl in case you normally always wear your shawls the same way.

I found this post from Berroco about different ways to wear shawls, which includes both watercolor illustrations and photos of different shawls shown worn in different ways.

You can also use the pattern itself to see different ways to wear that particular shawl. For instance the Lilitha pattern shows it worn like a bandana, with the tail to the front or the back, and almost like a poncho. There are so many different options!

[Photo: Noma Ndlovu.]

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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