Knit an Adorable Tiny Shrew

I’m going to admit up front here that all this time I thought a shrew was a bird. It’s actually a mole-like mammal that wort of looks like a mouse, but it isn’t a rodent. They live most places in the world (other than New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand and South America, thanks, Wikipedia!) and, at 385 known species they are the fourth-most species-diverse mammal family.

They’re also really cute.

Claire Garland reports that she had a shrew visiting her garden throughout the summer, and while it was too quick to photograph, it could be immortalized in knitting.

The real one probably didn’t have a tiny striped sweater, but I’ll allow it.

Claire says the design is “a little fiddly” as its worked in several tiny pieces (which are joined as you go) on the smallest knitting needles she could find (US 00, or 1.75 mm). The completed creature only stands about 3 inches/8 cm tall.

The good news is you might have stash yarn you can use to make this little one, as it only takes about 50 yards total.

She used tiny glue-in eyes, but you can embroider eyes instead (with French knots or just a little stitch). The sweater pattern is included in the pattern for the shrew.

The pattern is available for free on Ravelry but you really need to check out the Instagram Reel she shared when the pattern was released, because it’s super cute and tells a bit more of the story of the shrew in the garden.

Claire’s patterns are so sweet and this would be a great addition to or start of a collection of tiny woodland creatures to knit and create a little world for.

In the meantime, does anyone know what kind of bird I was thinking of when I was sure a shrew was a bird? That’s going to keep me confused for a while.

[Photo: Claire Garland]

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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