Knit an Adorable Doll Sweater

Little girls (well, any kids who like to play with dolls, actually) love to have different clothes to put their favorite dolls in and to allow the dolls to change their clothes almost as often as they do. Just like it’s fun to outfit the children in our lives with handmade things, making doll clothes can be really fun, too.

Classic Elite is offering a free pattern for a doll sweater that’s super cute. The Fiona Doll Hoodie is worked in their lovely Liberty Wool, which is superwash, making it perfect for kids and dolls alike (a bigger version of the sweater for small humans is available in the Liberty Wool Kids pattern booklet or as an individual PDF download).

It’s knit from the bottom up, mostly in reverse stockinette stitch, which nicely breaks up the colors of the self-striping yarn used in the sample. This would be a great little project to try seamless knitting techniques if you’ve never worked a sweater like this before (the sleeves and knit separately and joined to the body at the yoke).

[Photo via Classic Elite Yarns.]

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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