Knit a Vest with Cockatoo Charm

There’s something about projects with big, bold designs that makes me smile. Even if the subject matter isn’t necessarily something I’d want to commit to knitting, I appreciate the enthusiasm behind knitting an animal or your favorite food on a sweater.

In the case of the Cockatoo round neck vest from Annie Reilly, the subject in question is a showy bird. Fun fact: cockatoos are part of the parrot family, and most cockatoo species are either black or white because their feathers lack a texture that causes other birds’ feathers to reflect light, making them look different colors (thanks for that tidbit, San Diego Zoo!).

The vest features a cockatoo sitting on a branch that covers most of the front, along with some branches running up the side of the vest. In this case it’s an Australian pink cockatoo, so not entirely white, and it is showing off its crest. The colorwork is done with intarsia, using different balls of yarn for each of the colors across the row, and the pattern is worked from a chart.

The back of the vest is solid colored mostly stockinette stitch, which gives you a break from all the action on the front.

The project calls for DK weight yarn in eight colors, but some you only need a little bit of (black, gray, red and yellow) to incorporate all the details.

It comes in three sizes, ranging in chest measurement from 39.5 to 47.5 inches or 100 to 120 cm, so it’s meant to be worn with a fair bit of ease.

The pattern is based off one the designer made in the 1980s that was published in a book she co-authored in 1989. This version has been revamped with the round neck and some adjustments to the colorwork.

You can find this pattern on Ravelry. It’s perfect for any bird lover you know!

[Photo: Annie Riley]

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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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