Mix it Up with the Mixage Sweater Knitting Pattern

It’s fun to combine different colors and patterns in the same project, and the bold mix of texture and stripes in the Mixage sweater from Jimenez Joseph is really cool. There’s a diagonal line — it’s actually a cable — across the sweater front (and repeated on one of the sleeves) that breaks up the garment so half of it is worked in stripes and half in a more textured pattern (the back is solid in the same dotty purl pattern as the front half).

The pattern is boxy and comes in seven sizes, from 36 inch to 60.75 inch chest circumference. It’s meant to be worn with about six inches of positive ease.

While the textured stripes are shown in a contrasting color on this sample, if you click through to the pattern on Ravelry you can see a different version worked in one color that’s also really pretty.

The pattern is available on Ravelry for $6.75.

[Photo: Jimenez Joseph.]

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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