(Mostly) Gross Knitwear from Movies

Speaking of knitting as it relates to popular culture, I recently came across this slideshow from Vulture called “Great Moments in Dystopian Knitwear.” Because every post-apocalyptic movie (and probably the TV shows, too, though we haven’t seen a lot of winter in “The Walking Dead”) seems to have characters decked out in ratty, torn, dirty knits of one kind or another.

As the writer, Margaret Lyons, says, “knit hats will be the most treasured of all hats when the decay begins.” Indeed. Better start knitting, just in case.

By the way, one of the knits mentioned is of course the funky cowl thing Katniss wears in “The Hunger Games.” You can knit your own with patterns from Lion Brand (free registration required), Woolf’s Clothing ($5), Lolly Knits and Red Heart, no doubt among others.

Do you watch the knitwear as much as you watch the movie? I know I do!

[Photo courtesy of Lionsgate, via Vulture.]

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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