Knitting

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Most Popular Patterns of the Year on Ravelry

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Check out the most popular knitting patterns on Ravelry published this year.Just for fun I decided to check out the most popular patterns published this year on Ravelry. If you’re looking for something to make with yarn you got for Christmas or Hanukkah or to get a jump on your New Year’s resolution to use that great yarn already in your stash, you might want to check some of these out!

Note: I don’t know what “most popular” is based on, because there’s something to it other than number of projects made. But searching most popular and published this year, this is the order they are found in.

  1. Waiting for Rain shawl by Sylvia McFadden from the Shawl Joy ebook, C$7.50, 2,125 projects
  2. Talisman Shawl by Helen Stewart, part of the Shawl Society ebook, £14.40 for six patterns, 1,072 projects
  3. Smooth Operator Socks by Susan B. Anderson, $5, 1,433 projects
  4. Building Blocks Shawl by Stephen West, $6.50, 2,521 projects
  5. Pussyhat Project by Kat Coyle, free, 1,501 projects
  6. SlipStripeSpiral socks by Mylene Pijpers, AU$4.50 (free at the time of this writing), 1,138 projects
  7. Spindrift Shawl by Helen Stewart, £4.45 (or free if you join her shawl workshop email list), 991 projects
  8. Pure Joy shawl by Joji Locatelli, $5, 989 projects
  9. Close to You shawl by Justyna Lorkowska, free, 939 projects
  10. On the Spice Market shawl by Melanie Berg,  €5.20 EUR, 1,146 projects

Check out the most popular knitting patterns on Ravelry published this year.Interesting notes: seven out of these 10 most popular patterns are shawls. Two are socks and one is a hat that makes a political statement. Two are free projects (two others are at the time of this writing, too). And two are by the same designer.

Have you knit any of these projects? Or queued them? I got the SlipStripeSpiral pattern and will probably make it as my next pair of socks. And I already had my eye on Building Blocks, but I think a lot of these are gorgeous and definitely worth your time. What do you think?

[Photos via Ravelry.]

Comments

  1. I think Waiting for Rain looks interesting; however, I, too, thought the sock pattern (Slip Stripe Spiral) would be a hoot to try

  2. Love the pattern “waiting for rain”. I made 3, because this shawl fits comfortably on the shoulder and doesn’t slip. And looks fabulous!

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]