The Intentional Spinner

So you want to learn to spin. Of course you do. I did. Why? I have no idea, kind of seemed like the next direction to take my fiber addiction. And, doesn’t everyone need another hobby?

Enter Interweave Press and Judith MacKenzie McCuin’s book, “The Intentional Spinner”. First off, this book has really cool pictures, and lots of them. I’m a sucker for eye candy, what can I say, I blame it on the fiber addictions. In this book, Judith breaks it all down, from the ground up, from the different forms of fiber bases, cellulose, protein and manufactured, and puts them all together again, you actually know what you’re working with. And people! There are charts in this book! Charts!

Let that one sink in for a minute!

Are you back? Ok. In one section she talks about not only having yarn that is beautiful coming right off the wheel, but aiming for yarn that is gorgous plied, and worked up into your knitting. Knowing ahead of time how to get just the right twist so that the yarn will be just as nice in it’s final resting place as it was right off the wheel.

Preview the book, here: http://www.interweave.com/spin/books/IntentionalSpinner/preview.asp

And…. pssst…… there are patterns in this book too!!

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]

Have you read?