Knitting

Free Patterns, Tutorials and Project Ideas

Review – Cowlgirls!

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Whether its cowls, gaiters, snoods, bandannas, collars, necklaces or scarves, Cathy Carron’s Cowlgirls brings you the variations that you love.

Knit them back and forth. Knit them in the round (and a chart showing how to go from one to the other), this book revels in accessories to keep your neck warm and snuggly in stripes, laces, braids and cables, stitch patterns.

Forget tired scarves and bulky turtlenecks—funky, chunky, hip and happening cowls are where it’s at! Following up her hit book Hattitude, author and designer Cathy Carron weaves a fashion statement that puts in-the-know women head and shoulders above the rest. Among the more than 40 patterns provided here are a cozy neck wrap featuring a built-in iPod holder, a lacy drawstring hood, and a woven necklace sparkling with Swarovski crystals.

Comments

  3. Just completing “Hidden Treasure”. Looks great only problem is there are errors, this is the 1st cowl I’m making, hope there aren’t errors throughout the book.
    You don’t k2 p2 on rows 2 & 4 and bind off on
    row 3. Things start to go wrong when you get to the buttonhole flap as this is the one complicated row in the whole project.
    Just read it through and do what makes sense to you and not what it says!

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]