Show Off Your Showgirl Style with Knit Mitts

I am not a Swiftie, and I know that her latest album was a little controversial when it came out, but welcome for all who celebrate new music and a new phase in Taylor’s story.

And thanks to Laura Groff you can subtly show the world your showgirl side with here Just a Simple Showgirl Mitts.

The base pattern is a pair of super simple fingerless gloves with a separate space for the thumb. They call for fingering weight yarn and come in one size, about 9.5 inches long by 3.75 inches across when laid flat (that’s 24.13 cm long and 9.5 cm across).

The mitts are mostly straight stockinette stitch worked in the round, and you can leave them plain, worked in a solid color or stripes or whatever you want.

The pattern uses duplicate stitch in orange yarn (of course) to stitch the words show and girl on the fronts of each hand by the fingers. You can also bead on a ring where Taylor’s engagement ring would sit on the left hand.

If you don’t want to rock the show girl vibe, you could add any three or four letter words to the mitts that you like. I’m feeling knit and purl, of course, but you can use initials or whatever little message you want to spread on your mitts. The pattern only includes a chart for the words show girl, but they’re simple block text you could probably use as a template for writing out other words.

The pattern is available as free download from Creative Twist Studio, a yarn shop in Kentucky, and you can also buy a kit from them that includes the yarn and beads. What a fun way to support a small business in these weird times. The designer says this one is suitable for a confident beginner.

[Photo: Laura Groff]

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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