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The Art Of Gift Wrapping, by Wanda Wen

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This book has nothing to do with knitting, but I came across it and thought you’d enjoy hearing about it.

Using some of the most unconventional items on the planet Wanda wraps gifts. She takes old jewelry leftovers and wraps gifts. Banana leaves, grasses, and bark as well as the traditional papers, ribbons and bows, but in the most untraditional ways. Nothing is safe!

Jazz up your gift wrapping with The Art of Gift Wrapping Wanda’s 50 innovative ideas using organic, unique, and uncommon materials.

Have you ever received a gift wrapped in lichen and moss? Or berries? Or how about topped with a bird’s nest and jelly beans? Go beyond boring and enter the twilight zone with taped candies, left over gauzes, crayon shavings, stamps and even rocks and stones. Very unique. And fun too.

You can get Wanda’s book, The Art of Gift Wrapping, at www.pottercraft.com

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Knit a Leopard Print Shawl and Learn about Yarn Substitution

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]