Knitting Daily Series 500 is Here!

Knitting Daily Series 500 is here! This is 5 hours and 48 minutes of Knitting Inspiration, pure and simple! Here’s a short run down, but you can see a preview, over at Interweave, by clicking on this link!

Episode 501: Ground Rules Eunny Jang demonstrates how to avoid common knitting mistakes to get your knitting started on the right foot, Vicki Square teaches the South American join technique, and the knit-along for the Fallen Leaves Scarf begins.

Episode 502: Finishing Touches Learn how to knit basic buttonholes, take a look at button choices on the market to decorate your knitting, learn how to felt a boutique-style flower tote, and continue the knit-along of the Fallen Leaves Scarf with simple slip stitch knitting.

Episode 503: Play with Color Eunny demonstrates the basics of entrelac colorwork knitting, designer Lorna Miser talks about her playful methods of choosing yarn colors, and the Fallen Leaves Scarf project wraps up with seed stitch and basket weave knitting.

Episode 504: Hat Basics Learn three ways to knit a cap, join designer Jared Flood as he demonstrates a basic way to decrease stitches in the knitting of his Turn A Square Hat pattern, and begin the second knit-along: the Little Lamb Sock Critter.

Episode 505: Make It Unique Eunny begins with a primer on joining yarns, spinner extraordinaire Amy King shows us her special techniques to spinning fuzzy yarns, Shay demonstrates simple embroidery techniques to spice up your knitwear, and the Little Lamb Sock Critter knit-along continues with the cabling section of the cute critter.

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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