Knit Vintage Look Christmas Stockings

I love a good throwback knitting pattern, and in particular I have a soft spot for knit and crocheted Christmas stockings. My grandma knit stockings for her kids, their spouses and their children back in the day, and my mom knit them for all the kids of the next generation. I was also once tasked by a friend to crochet a few stockings for kids to match ones their grandmother had made a long time ago.

Using vintage or vintage inspired patterns for stockings (and other holiday decor, for that matter) is nice because it makes the projects instantly look like they’ve always been there.

Jess Bandelin has a trio of designs to get you started with their Intarsia Christmas Stockings.

These worsted weight stockings are knit flat with a heel flap and are seamed after the knitting is done. This allows you to use the intarisa colorwork knitting technique, where you do each section of color with a separate ball of yarn rather than carrying the yarn across the row or round. These patterns use charts, but they’re pretty easy to read because the image on the chart looks just like what you’re knitting.

(If you’ve never done it before, check out my post on how to knit intarsia.)

The pattern options include an elf in a dress, an elf in trousers and a Christmas tree. I love this one in particular because it uses buttons as the ornaments on the tree, so it’s an easy way to add even more vintage flair. Alternatively you could add beads, embroider on the tree or just leave it plain if that’s more your style.

The elves are also super cute, and the one wearing trousers could easily be transformed into more of a Santa figure if you wanted. They’re done up in holiday colors here on a bright blue background, which is a lot of fun, but you can use any colors you like to make the vintage inspired stockings of your dreams.

Learn more and grab the patterns on Ravelry.

[Photo: Jess Bandelin]

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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