Review: Super Duper Knit Hats for Beginners

Evelyne Nemcsok has been a friend of Craft Gossip for a while, so when I heard she had released an ebook of knitting patterns I wanted to check it out. She sent me a copy to look at, and it’s a great collection of quick and easy patterns particularly for newer knitters.

Super Duper Knit Hats for Beginners has six projects:

Big Hat
Faux Fur Lumberjack Hat
Infinity Scarf (big enough to wear over your head)
Peaked Beret
Twisted Stitch Pom Pom Hat
Plum Fedora

All of the projects are worked flat on two needles and seamed after the knitting is done, which is great for knitters who might be intimidated by working on circulars or DPNs. All the projects are for adult women and come in one size.

The instructions are simple and clear, and terms are defined in the pattern notes when needed. There’s no knitting instruction here, but those with a grasp on the basics should be able to knit any of these projects with no problem.

It’s a fun collection for people who love to knit hats and want to make a variety of projects for everyone on their list. New knitters who want to pick up a few skills while whipping up some quick and cute accessories will enjoy this book as well.

About the Book: 22 pages, ebook only, six patterns (two each are rated easy, easy + and “a bit tricky). Published by Evelyne Nemcsok, The ebook in the US is here: and in Canada is here:

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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