Knitting

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Knitting With Variagated Yarns.

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I’ve always loved variegated yarns. The mystery of the pattern and the striping, or pooling, or even flashing is intriquing. That being said, not everyone likes these surprises. There are some who want perfect stipes with no pooling, and no flashing, just perfect stripes in their projects. That’s ok too. One of the wonders of variegated yarns. Toddle on over to any LYS or even department store craft section and you’re sure to find at least a minimum of selection on the this versatile yarn.

How do you knit with this stuff? Me? I throw caution to the wind and just love to see the way the colors knit up. Everything from drop dead gorgeous, to eewwwwwww, what were they thinking.

Currently I’m working with some sock yarn, Flat Feet from Conjoined Creations. I don’t like the colors in the flat, just not my style, but knitted up they are cool. Very blue-jeany, almost desert southwest-y colors that I normally wouldn’t wear, but I do like them. And yes, there is pooling, striping and flashing but that’s ok. When they are finished, my socks will not be identical, but hey, I call it a good day when I can find two that match anyway.

I recently found a really good site with information on working with variegated yarns. Keeping You In Stitches publishes this article, it’s here:  http://variegated.k1p1keepingyouinstitchesstudio.com/asi1.html And guess what? she’s got lots of free patterns there for dishcloths etc.

Check her out here:  http://freepatterns.k1p1keepingyouinstitchesstudio.com/

Comments

  1. I am currently in love with Bernat’s Baby Jacquards. (I knit newborn caps and donate them to my local hospital.) I’ve used three of their variations so far. Photos of the first, “Boo Berries,” knit into a cap can be found on my blog: http://www.karlakrafts.com. I’ll post photos of the other two soon.

    The third variation I used, “Spearmint Candy,” didn’t come out quite as neatly as the first two. I think it’s because of where I started. I use the long tail cast on, and when I start the next cap, I think I’ll make sure I begin in the middle of a large section of a solid color. We’ll see! In the meantime, hats, I mean caps off to Bernat!

Have you read?

Knit a Leopard Print Shawl and Learn about Yarn Substitution

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]