Why Not Knit Some Halloween Ornaments?

We all know about knitting Christmas balls, but what about knit Halloween balls?

Yes, some people really do put up a tree for Halloween, but even if you don’t, these would make a cute garland or they’d look great in a bowl on the table or something.

Susann Hajjar designed these free color charts with the Julekuler generator and they don’t have written patterns, just the charts. But you can see from the chart that you would start with 12 stitches, increase every other round 7 times, then work straight for a certain number of rounds until you decrease down again in the same fashion.

Here are links to all her charts, which are downloadble PDFs on Ravelry in English or German:

These are so cute, and all but the bat and the witch use just two colors, so they’re pretty easy to knit, too, if you’re comfortable working in the round, reading charts and doing stranded colorwork.

If anyone knits these I’d love to see them!

[Photo by Susann Hajjar via Ravelry.]

Looking for more things to Knit for Halloween? Check out these Halloween Knitting patterns we found on Etsy.

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]

Have you read?