This Simple Color-Blocked Scarf is Perfect for Beginners

I’m a big fan of quick and easy knitting patterns. Even though I can do more intricate things, and every now and then a design that really requires my attention is something I want, my lifestyle is such that things I can pick up and put down easily are most often on my needles.

That’s why I love this super simple black and white color and pattern blocked scarf from Mama in a Stitch.

It alternates stripes of black and white, Garter and Stockinette, so it’s easy to know where you are and what you’re supposed to be doing.

But this probably isn’t a project that you’ll put down for long, because it’s also worked in super bulky yarn, so you can whip it up in no time, even if you’re a new knitter. And since there’s probably still more cold to come for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, this is one you can knit up in a weekend and still get a lot of use out of before spring.

Are you still knitting winter accessories or have you moved on to lighter projects? I’d love to know!

[Photo via Mama in a Stitch.]

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]

Comments

Have you read?