Knit a Super Simple Vest

I love a project that’s great for beginners but also gives people who might have more projects under their belts (read: more stash) to use what they have in a fun and creative way.

The Bernat Beginner Change Your Stripes Knit Vest is a super simple, boxy, garter stitch vest worked in stripes of different colors. As shown it uses four colors, but I will never stop saying you can use as many colors as you like on a project like this. This might be a great time to pull out a magic ball and use all the little random bits you have in your stash. (It calls for super bulky yarn but you could also mix it up by holding two strands of worsted weight together to use even more stash.)

As written you change colors after two rows, which makes sense because that gives you one garter ridge, so if you wanted to keep the look more uniform you could choose odd balls where you have enough to knit at least two rows (or four rows if you want the front and back to match).

This piece is literally just rectangles finished with a bit of garter stitch to form the armholes and then sewn together.

And while this would be a super fast stash buster if you’re the sort of knitter who needs such a thing, this pattern is perfect for beginners, too, because it has tons of pictures to help you figure out how to change colors and manage your yarn without cutting it every two rows. (This is actually a super helpful thing to know and past me would have loved that knowledge when I knit a baby blanket with tons of color changes and cut the yarn each time.)

Grab the free pattern and any supplies you might need from Yarnspirations.

[Photo: Yarnspirations]

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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