Textured Knitting Adds Depth to this Hat/Cowl Duo

Textured stitch patterns are a lot of fun because they make a project look more interesting — and sometimes more difficult — without really being any more difficult to knit. It also can be fun to throw in stripes on top of textured to get a different look without any more work.

The Runo Hat and Cowl set from Reis Luke Aquino is inspired by the textures on fish traps used in the Philippines. The patterns use worsted weight yarn and offer suggestions for using different yarns and adding stripes.

The stitch pattern would also be fun to use on a blanket or pillow, and you can use one or two or many different colors to further highlight the pattern.

Get more info and your copy of the pattern on Ravelry.

Check out these books dedicated to Knitted Cowl Patterns still looking for more cowl patterns? Check these out on Etsy.

[Photo: Reis Luke Aquino.]

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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