Knitting

Free Patterns, Tutorials and Project Ideas

To Knit or Not to Knit; Is that a Question?

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to knit or not to knit

I’m sending this one to Mary!

This week’s giveaway is a fun take on a knitting essay collection. To Knit or Not to Knit: Helpful and Humorous Hints for the Passionate Knitter by Elvira Woodruff is composed of a series of advice-column-style questions about the knitting life posed to a fictional Mrs. Wicks.

She answers questions by looking to history (for instance, a question about buying too much yarn is paired with the Oscar Wilde quote “the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it”) and offering stories from her own knitting life and sharing patterns along the way. (Find them here.)

The book covers subjects such as how to pack your knitting bag, what to do when you’re in the depths of a seemingly interminable project, knitting as stress relief, knitting for charity, what to make for babies and more.

It’s a cute idea for a book of essays, and they are quick and funny reads. This is a good one to remind you how cool knitters are or to gift to a fun knitting friend.

If you’d like a chance to win this book, leave a comment on this post before the end of the day Sunday, Sept. 3. I’d love to know a good piece of knitting advice you’ve received. One of my favorites: as long as you’re happy with the results, it doesn’t matter how you got there, which is the long way of saying there’s no right way to knit.

Thanks for visiting, commenting and sharing, and good luck!

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Comments

  1. My fave is when in doubt, knit it out. It applies to figuring out patterns but also dealing with life in general.

  2. Not really advice, but years ago I created the word Yarnsulin – as in “I’d better take a shot of Yarnsulin before I walk into that LYS or I’ll go into fiber-shock and buy everything in the store!” The patterns are a wonderful collection of stashbusters, and I bet the writing is wonderful. Thanks for the giveaway.

  3. I agree with there are no right or wrong ways to knit. Don’t be afraid to change and adapt patterns to knit the item you want!

  4. A friend of mine always carries tons of stitch markers and a mini skein of yarn and a plastic needle along with her project. She says that you could need to put a lifeline or use your stitch markers to divide your knitting work in sections and you should have all that you need with you.

  5. When your knitting mojo leaves do a small project like a dishcloth or a hat to give you the satisfaction of finishing an item

  6. I had avoided blocking for decades! When I finally caved in to taking that advice I was so pleased with the results. Cannot believe the difference. Viva la “blocking!

  7. “Only god doesn’t make mistakes”. Remember that when knitting a complicated (usually Aran/cabled) pattern. No one else will notice the ONE stitch you purled instead of knitting, or even the crossover you did the wrong way!! I remember finishing a wonderful sweater, all sewn up before I saw a crossover done in the wrong direction. I’ve had the sweater 10 years now and no-one has ever noticed, although I have had lots of praise for the “wonderful design”!

  8. I would love to get this book for my sister who is an avid knitter. Her birthday is coming up!

  9. Thanks for the give away. For a hint, I’ll rave about my newest tool, which is a slender piece of metal with a crochet hook on one end and a sharpish “picking point” on the other. I never knew they existed or that I needed one, but I bought it on impulse and now use it regularly.

  11. A zillion years ago, when the internet was young, a message thread on the KnitList involved what knitters carried with them. I paid attention and now I ALWAYS have a small zippered purse with a pen, pad, scissors, tape measure, crochet hook, stitch markers, fine nail file, a ten-dollar bill, stitch holder, cable needle, and yarn needle. (Thank you, Calypso; I’m going to add a small skein of embroidery cotton for use as a life line.) This purse goes with me everywhere. It even came in handy at a wedding when a bridesmaid needed a thread snipped.

  12. My favorite advice is when I am debating whether to rip back to fix something. My friend and I say “we like knitting so we don’t mind doing more of it!”

  15. If I find a tiny mistake in a finished project, I always tell pple that I did it on purpose to show the article was hand made, note machine made.

  16. The knitters in my group remind me that I’ll be the only one that will know the mistake is there ????

  17. Think of your knitting “mistakes” as a design element which makes the project uniquely your own.

  18. Lifelines! Especially for those of us who watch TV while knitting – so much easier to unravel those rows you purled instead of knitted during the chase scene.

  19. “Just finish the project.” The best advice I’ve received that not only relates to knitting but to sewing, painting g, and life in general.

  21. My favorite quote is “never let your fear decide your fate” and it works for knitting projects, too! Don’t be afraid to try new stitches or techniques. They’re usually not too complicated and end up looking great.

Have you read?

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]