Stitch up Some Medals for Olympics Pretend Play

If you have little kids you know how much they love to pretend, and if they’re watching the Olympics they probably want to pretend they’re winning medals, too.

You can stitch up some easy medals for them to play with and wear in no time flat while you’re watching the Games, and they are sure to keep playing with them long after the flame has been extinguished for another couple of years.

I found two patterns for knit medals, including the Olympic Gold Medal Ribbon designed by Studio Knits SF (check her blog for a video tutorial of the pattern). Hers uses red, white and blue for the ribbon bit, which you could change to your nation’s colors if you like or knit in lime green, which seems to be the color they are using in Rio.

Another option is the pattern from the Homemade Mama, which uses an interesting but simple technique to knit a circular shape flat. She shows medals of different colors, and hung hers on ribbon to make the knitting portion a little faster so you can get on to playing.

Would you make these for your kids? I’m rooting around for gold yarn as soon as I finish typing this.

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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