Knitting

Free Patterns, Tutorials and Project Ideas

New Series of Knitting Daily TV Airing Now

by

knittinf daily tv series 1400Series 1400 of Knitting Daily TV, the third series with Vickie Howell as host, just started airing on public television stations nationwide, and it’s also available for download or purchase as a DVD.

This season includes 13 episodes covering everything from colorwork to sweaters, accessories to spinning and crochet. Here’s a rundown of all the episodes:

  • Great Beginnings
  • Thick of It
  • Transitional Knits
  • Norwegian Knits
  • Sweater Weather
  • Accessorize It!
  • Arm Yourself
  • Playtime Knits
  • Crochet Home
  • Made in North America
  • New Spin
  • Novelty of it All
  • Don’t Sweater the Small Stuff

The episodes include information about yarns, cool techniques like Latvian braids and Aran lace, cool products and tips from knitwear and crochet designers from around the world.

Do you watch Knitting Daily TV? I’d kind of gotten out of the habit but I’ve got my DVR warmed up for it this season!

Comments

  4. Previously was able to obtain the patterns shown on the show. Now
    only see the whole series to buy. I just want certain patterns that they say are available. Help please.

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]