Knitted Lace of Estonia, Book and DVD

While I personally haven’t yet seen a copy of this book, you can be sure that as soon as I do, it will be snatched up just as fast as I can. And if you’re the one holding it, be sure to count your fingers afterwards!

So, this book HAS to be awesome, I mean, a book about knitted lace! And I LOVE cultural patterns, so this fits the bill twice. And now, there’s a DVD featuring the author, Nancy Bush.

This description is directly from Interweave’s site:

Deepen your knowledge of lace knitting with 14 Estonian, heirloom quality lace patterns from Nancy Bush in a new edition of her bestselling book Knitted Lace of Estonia. Now with a bonus 1-hour DVD, Knitted Lace of Estonia will teach you about traditional lace-knitting techniques, such as:

Traditional twig, peacock, and lily of the valley patterns and their variations
Different ways to make the distinctive nupp, or subdued bobble
Modern adaptations of the classic ways of constructing shawls and scarves and adding lace edges
On the new bonus DVD, Nancy explores the knitting traditions of Estonia, as well as offers in-depth instructions for the book’s patterns and techniques, as well as designing an Estonian-style shawl, stole or scarf from beginning to end.

MUST. GET. COPY.

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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