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What Are You Doing for I Love Yarn Day?

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i love yarn dayOct. 12 is officially the second I Love Yarn Day, which is a holiday made up by the Craft Yarn Council to celebrate all things yarny. It’s not just about knitting, of course, but we knitters can certainly get in on the action by knitting (naturally), preferably in public, visiting our local yarn shops or otherwise supporting the yarn industry and the community of designers that provide so many fun things for us to knit and crochet through the year.

Speaking of designers, check out the design inspiration for I Love Yarn Day if you want to knit something special to wear on the big day (like Nicky Epstein’s cabbage rose) or a quick project you can knit on that day.

Knowing me, I’ll forget there’s anything special about that day and will just be knitting like mad trying to finish things up for my book.

How about you? Any plans to do anything special, or is every day I Love Yarn Day in your world?

Comments

  2. Every day IS I love Yarn Day but it’s cool there is a specific day for it. I’ll be knitting up a Hallowe’en wig for a friend who has lost her hair to chemo treatments. Knitting it up in her school colors so she can wear it to football games.

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]