Things to Watch to Inspire Your Knitting

I don’t know why a lot of knitting-related videos have popped up in my newsfeed recently, but I thought they might make a good watchlist for those of you who like to watch things about knitting while you are knitting. Some of them are kind of old but all are worth your time.

First, have you seen the video of the cake with knit icing? This is amazing, and I’m sure it took forever, but it’s beautiful and actually doesn’t look that hard if you were willing to put in the time. The knitting is made by twisting strands of sugar paste together, then placing ones twisted in opposite directions next to each other to give the effect of the vs of knitting. Spectacular, and fun to watch, too. (From Cakes for Show, via Knit Hacker.)

This one is a few months old, but I think I missed it the first time around. The Secret History of Knitting is a 46 minute long video talking about the history of knitting and what it means to be a knitter in this day and age. It was produced by Makeful, and I haven’t watched it all yet but it is fun.

And the last one I know I have seen and shared before. It’s just a lovely little video called Knit Me Some Happiness, about what happens when a group of friends gets together and makes something, then has a picnic in a field of sheep. I promise it will make you smile, if for no other reason than the guy knitting in the bathtub.

Have you seen any great knitting-related videos lately? I’d love to hear about them!

[Photo from Knit Me Some Happiness, via Vimeo.]

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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