Try Illusion Knitting with this Baby Blanket Knitting Pattern

Illusion knitting is one of the knitting skills that I haven’t done a lot with, but it looks like it would be fun and the effect is really cool.

Basically illusion knitting is done by working in two color ridges in knits and purls, and changing whether you knit or purl in a particular color makes the design. But it’s a secret design because when viewed from the front, an illusion knitting project basically just looks like stripes. But when you look from the side, an image appears.

Illusion knitting is also known as shadow knitting, and if you want to learn a lot more you can check out the book Shadow Knitting by Vivian Hoxbro.

If you want to try the technique out for yourself, try this fun baby blanket knitting pattern from Knit Hit Shop.

From the front it just looks like stripes, but at an angle you can see a design of interlocking puzzle pieces.

The project comes in two sizes, with the small version being 26.77 inches square (that’s 68 cm) and the larger version is 31.5 inches or 80 cm square. So neither of them is huge but they’d be cute as baby blankets or stroller blankets for a little one in your life.

The pattern calls for DK or light worsted weight yarn, so you could also make it a bit bigger by using heavier yarn if you want. The key for illusion knitting is that the colors need to have good contrast so the image will be visible.

I think this project would be a fun way to learn the basics of illusion knitting with a relatively easy and repetitive pattern. Illusion knitting designs can get a lot more complicated, including words or more intricate images, so this would be a nice place to start.

Have you ever done illusion knitting? I’d love to hear about what you made and how it went!

[Photo: Knit Hit Shop]

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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