SOAR Scholoarship Applications From Interweave!

Come one, Come all to SOAR!

In 1995, Interweave Press established a scholarship program as a way of supporting fiber students to expand their interest in spinning, to share valuable information within the spinning community, as well as to preserve, expand, and promote spinning in the community at large. This program is funded by generous donations from SOAR participants, and funds qualified individuals to attend SOAR.

In order to receive a SOAR scholarship you must demonstrate that you are actively involved in learning an aspect of spinning and sharing your knowledge with the larger community. Your involvement may include fields related to handspinning, such as dyeing, knitting, weaving, fiber preparation, and the like. You don’t have to be enrolled in a formal training course or a degree program. Applicants must be 18 years or older to apply.

There are two kinds of SOAR scholarships: full and assistance. Our full scholarship covers the fees for Workshop and Retreat, lodging, and meals. The assistance scholarship covers the fee for either the Workshop only or the Retreat only. The information describing sessions at the 2010 SOAR will be available in mid-February on our website, interweavesoar.com.

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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