Knit a Super Tall Cowl for the Last Days of Winter

Winter is trying to leave the southern United States pretty quickly, but I’m not completely convinced we won’t get another cold snap before the season is over. I’m still intermittently working on a couple of sweaters I hope my daughter and I will get a chance to wear this season, and if you live in cooler climates you’ve probably still got time to knit something quick and enjoy it this winter.

And of course our Southern Hemisphere friends are gearing up for the cold, and quick accessories are always welcome on either end of the season, right?

Mama in a Stitch recently guest posted over at Stitch and Unwind, sharing a fun bulky cowl that’s really tall, really warm and a great scrap project since it has a bit of colorwork.

But don’t worry, the Alpine Heights Cowl is still really easy and a great way to practice if you haven’t done much (or any) stranded colorwork before. And because it’s worked in bulky yarn on size 17 US knitting needles, you’ll be done before the last snowdrift melts.

[Photo via Mama in a Stitch.]

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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