Knit a Vest That’s Covered in Cats

This might be another one of those posts where all you need to know is in the headline.

Knit vest. Cats? Sign me up.

The Darjeeling Vest by Sangmi Lee offers exactly that.

It’s a stranded knitting pattern worked from the bottom up, with a chart for the sweet little cat faces that are all over the project. It has a round neckline and what the designer calls a “regular fit,” so you can wear it on its own like a tank top or as a vest over a shirt or dress.

The pattern uses DK weight yarn and comes in six sizes. Actual finished measurements of the garment range from 32 to 46 2/5 inches, or 81 to 118 cm. Positive ease of 2 to 3 1/5 inches, or 5 to 8 cm, is suggested, so your body should be that much smaller than the measurement of the size that you choose.

Because I have a black cat (and a tuxedo cat) I of course love that all of the cat faces are black, but you could also change it up so that the cats look more like your favorite cat. Or make most of them black and knit just one of them in, say, bright blue or something, just for whimsy.

No matter the colors you choose, this knit looks like a lot of fun. I peeked at the finished projects on Ravelry and saw that someone also modified it to be a sweater and continued the cat motifs on the sleeves, which is also super cute if you don’t want a vest.

The pattern is available in English and Korean and you can download a copy from Ravelry. And if you’re a dog person feeling left out by all this pro-feline propaganda, be sure to check out her Hundreds of Dogs sweater, also on Ravelry. It’s cute, too, if you like that sort of thing.

[Photo: Sangmi Lee]

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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