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Pin of the Week: Ways to Knit Ruffles

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knit ruffles tricksy knitterThis week’s favorite from the vaults of my knitting board on Pinterest is a post from Tricksy Knitter on how to knit ruffles. As you can see from the picture there are tons of different ways to add a ruffle to knitting, and these are not even all of the options.

This post offers a roundup of all the different ruffles that have been explored on the Tricksy Knitter site, with links so you can quickly find the ones you want to learn more about.

I love the corkscrew ruffle, which I think would be adorable at the top of a little girl’s sock, and the gathered eyelet ruffle, a classic that gets you a ruffle and extra embellishment when you thread a ribbon through the eyelets.

Something about spring has me ready to break out the ruffles! Do you ever knit ruffles? I’d love to hear how you use them.

[Photo via Tricksy Knitter.]

Comments

  2. I wish I’d seen this last week! Oy vey! I was working on a skirt for a mermaid, and I wanted it to be really ruffly. Oh, well. I’ll save this for next time.

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]