Knitting

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Win a Copy of Berroco’s New Baby Book

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comfort knitting babies and toddlersComfort Knitting and Crochet: Babies and Toddlers has been sitting on my bedside table for a few weeks now, waiting to be looked at (it could be I’m a little over baby knitting right now because I’m finishing up my book and just don’t want to judge my book against it and vice versa). The little bit I’ve flipped through it it looks really cute.

The projects come from Norah Gaughan and the Berroco Design Team and use Berroco’s Comfort and Vintage lines, which are great choices for kids because they’re washable, soft and come in a good variety of colors.

Berroco is giving 25 lucky readers the chance to win a copy of the book. All you have to do is fill out this form, including your e-mail and shipping addresses, by the end of the day Thursday, also known as Oct. 11. Participants must be from the United States or Canada to win. And I’ll be sure to let you know what I think of the book just as soon as I give it a closer look.

Specific to knitters, you can join our Knitting Patterns Only group to get, well, knitting patterns, ask questions and gain inspiration for what to knit next.

Looking for more Baby Knitting patterns? Check these out on Etsy.

Comments

  2. This sounds like it would be a good book to have. I have one grandchild and love to knit her all sorts of things.

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]