Too Good To Miss….

Vogue has done it again! Their latest Stitch Dictionary, called Lace Knitting, is #5 in their Stitchionary 5 arsenol. With this book, anyone, and I do mean ANYONE can knit lace. I know what you’re thinking, that maybe anyone can do lace but you can’t. But think of it this way. It’s just a series of yarn overs and decreases strategically placed to make intentional holes!

There are several sections in the book, the first being Easy/Mesh designs.

The next section, Edgings, gives lots of designs to dress up anything you can think of.

Chevron designs are easy too, again, with charts and row by row instructions for all of these designs. All over designs such as sweet violets and field of daisies, perfect for your summer sweaters, and leaf designs for your cooler weather items. Panels patterns are perfect for afghans. Combos section shows how to combine these awesome designs into 2 or more per item. Come up with your own unique designs! And finally Motifs, such as sea star and medallions finish out the book.

Included, of course, is a glossary, complete index and technique section to help you on your way to knitted lace. While this isn’t a project book, it’s a technique manual, if you’re interested in dressing up your standard patterns or creating your own designs, this one is a must have. From, none other than Vogue!

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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