Meet Tom Daley, Olympian and Knitter

Tom Daley is best known as a member of the British Olympic team, who recently won gold with Matty Lee in synchronized diving.

When practices and meets were curtailed in 2020, Daley found himself with a lot of time on his hands and took up knitting, and, later, crochet. He started an Instagram account where he shares his makes, and has even released a pattern for a crocheted granny square jumper that’s sold on Love Crafts as a benefit for a brain tumor research charity.

In an interview with Rowan Yarns he said his first project was a knit scarf for his mum, and while he likes the ease of shaping and adjusting sizes in crochet, he prefers the look of knitting.

He’s been quite prolific in his year and a half as a stitcher, making sweaters, toys, baby things, even a crocheted cat couch.

He said in that post he planned to take his knitting to Tokyo, and he posted the adorable medal cozy he made for his new hardware on Instagram. We wish him and all crafty Olympians well in the Games!

[Photo via Made with Love by Tom Daley.]

Looking for more Tom Daley knitting items? Check out these items we found on Etsy

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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