Knitting and Math Combine in Wooly Thoughts

I came across this article from the Guardian recently about a husband and wife who explore math-inspired knitting.

Pat Ashforth and Steve Plummer have made more than 90 math-inspired afghans, as well as other expressions of mathematical ideas in knitting and crochet.

They share their creations at Wooly Thoughts, and their work has been featured at the Science Museum in London, among other places.

The pieces are beautiful even if you don’t know the meaning behind them, and the couple have used them to help illustrate and talk about mathematical concepts in classrooms, where everyone can look at and talk about the same model.

Their projects aim to take the stigma away from both men knitting and women doing math, and they say they hear a lot more that women say they can’t do math than men say they can’t knit. Here’s hoping projects like this can help put both of those stereotypes to rest.

[Photo by Pat Ashforth, via the Guardian.]

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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