Little Things to Knit to Make Winter Better

I know it hasn’t been actual winter in the Northern Hemisphere for that long, but as soon as we get past the holidays the weight of how much winter we have left to deal with starts to get to me. That means it’s time to knit up a little something that’s useful and pretty, like tissue covers, hot water bottle cozies and tea cozies.

Grab your brightest yarns to add a little cheer to your house for the coldest part of the year!

These little tissue holders are perfect for making it a little easier to find your tissue pack in your bag or on your desk (if your desk is as messy as mine!). The free pattern from kmkat uses sock yarn, so it’s a great way to use those little bits left from other projects.

If you use a hot water bottle to add a little warmth this time of year, why not stitch up a pretty cover for it? This one from Olga Beckmann (find it on Ravelry) uses super bulky yarn so it stitches up in no time, and includes a pretty cable that’s easy enough to do without a cable needle.

You can also knit your bottle a Fair Isle sweater with this design from Laura Penrose (also on Ravelry). It’s worked with two strand of fingering weight held together (or a DK held on its own) and fits a 2 liter bottle.

You can come up with your own embellishments or just knit it plain with this basic hot water bottle cover from Stitches by Artgaze. It calls for three strands of DK weight yarn held together (which comes to a super bulky gauge worked on size 17 US/12mm needles) and is worked in the round.

Now that your water bottle is cozy, how about your teapot? I love this beehive cozy from Knitting Pattern World. It uses chunky yarn and a fun welting pattern that gives it a beehive look. There’s even a little bee to stitch for the top!

The Teapot Turtleneck is a free pattern on Ravelry from Suzanne Resaul that uses worsted weight yarn and an easy ribbing stitch so it can stretch to fit teapots of different shapes.

Another freebie is the Tea Mitten pattern from Elisabeth Kleven on Ravelry, which uses DK weight yarn and is worked from the bottom up in the round in a ribbed pattern with a button flap worked much like a thumb gusset on a mitten.

While we’re keeping tea warm, why not also make your tea bags cozy? This little project from Julie Tarsha (available on Ravelry) is perfect if you carry tea bags in your bag and don’t want them to get squashed or lost. It calls for a tiny bit of worsted weight yarn and a little button to close it.

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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