Knit Along with Kaffe Fassett

Rowan is getting set to launch its second mystery knitalong project on Oct. 1, and this time the designer behind the fun is color master Kaffe Fassett.

Rowan’s brand manager, Kate Butler, says in a video about the project that the aim was to get more people knitting in “the Kaffe way,” which isn’t difficult knitting, just a lot of color.

“I only go for the most basic techniques,” he says in the video, “but it’s really extravagant in color.”

The projects involve multicolored squares, and you can choose to make an afghan, a small cushion, an oblong cushion or all three. Four colorways have been selected by Fassett for the project. Each one uses 10 different colors, and you can download the shopping list now (it’s a PDF) if you’re interested in the project.

It uses Rowan Pure Wool Worsted, which is machine washable and worsted weight, so whatever it is you’re making will be colorful, durable and get a lot of use for years to come.

The project will run through Dec. 19 and includes instructional videos by Fassett and designer Sarah Hatton.

If you decide to take part, I’d love to hear about it!

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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