Skillful Fancy Shawls to Knit

Yesterday I shared some simple shawl knitting patterns, and today I thought I would follow up with a few shawl patterns that require a little more skill (or, really, more patience) but are also really beautiful and great for the slow pace of winter knitting. A lot of them are from Berroco, it turns out. They really know how to make pretty shawls over there.

For instance, Knud, a fun capelet with a sort of slouchy cable shawl knitting pattern worked in a thick, printed wool that has a really interesting effect. Or Valdai, a triangular shawl with different lace patterns worked on the panels. Or what about Hydrus, a gorgeous beaded lace number that is voluminous enough to keep you warm even though it’s worked with really thin yarn.

I also really like the Pear Sorbet capelet knitting pattern from Marly Bird, which uses a skein of yarn and a fun little lace panel and a lace border for extra fun.

And then there’s the lovely rectangular shawl knitting pattern from Fyberspates (free download with membership at Love Knitting) that features an allover diamond lace pattern and looks perfect for spinning in.

See something that catches your eye? I’d love to hear about it!

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Looking for more amazing shawl patterns? Check out these Knitting patterns we found on Etsy.

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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