The Double-Knit Witch Bookmark is a Perfect Project for Halloween

I’ve written a lot of content about Halloween knitting projects in the past (see some links below) but of course I always want to be able to share what’s new for each holiday season, so I did a Ravelry search by date so I could see what’s new.

I came across this great double-knit witch bookmark from Sandra Jäger, which would be a great project to knit for Halloween and use the next time you’re reading Harry Potter or Edgar Alan Poe.

The witch is accompanied by flying bats, which add to the spookiness of the project.

If you’ve never done double knitting before, it can be a little confusing at first, but this small project is a great way to start. It makes a really cool effect where the picture is the same on both sides but the colors are reversed.

Are you knitting anything fun for Halloween? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo by Bine Design: Sandra Jaeger via Ravelry.]

Looking for more Halloween Knitting patterns? Check these out on Etsy.

More Halloween Patterns

Halloween knitting for cats

Halloween knitting for dogs

Knit hats for Halloween

Halloween knitting projects

Halloween socks

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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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