More Bernie Mitten Inspired Knits

After nearly a dozen Bernie Mitten knitting patterns popped up in a matter of days, knitters are now getting into other projects inspired by those now-iconic mitts. Lots of patterns are now available on Etsy also.

They actually have a great pattern of multicolored chevron and simple crosses that will still be fun to wear long after the memes have died down.

Let’s start with Caitlin Hunter’s Feel the Bern cropped top, which is based on her popular Soldotna Crop with the colorwork added on top. It hasn’t been knit or tested so it is available as a free pattern on Ravelry.

Feel the Bern is also the name of a hat pattern using the same colorwork designs, this one designed by Christine M. Watson. The worsted weight hat uses four colors of yarn and is available on Ravelry for $3.

The Weekend at Bernie’s Beanie is another free pattern, this one designed by Rosee Woodland. It uses aran weight yarn, is available in four sizes and has the classic colorwork designs we’ve all come to love.

Bernie’s Socks by Stone Knits include what looks like a slightly fancied up version of the mittens, with the colorwork around the leg and bottom of the foot. They are worked in fingering weight yarn and are available in three sizes. The pattern is free on Ravelry.

It seems like Bernie’s motifs have graced everything in the knitting world other than a scarf or cowl (that I’ve seen). I’m working on a cowl version right now that I hope to have released by the end of the week.

Have you started a Bernie mittens-inspired project? I’d love to hear about 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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