Work Your Memories Into a Blanket

I love the idea of thinking of your leftover yarn not as remnants or something wasteful, but as memories of the projects that you made with it. Much like making a patchwork quilt reminds you of all the things you made with that fabric before, knitting a stash busting project with your yarn leftovers can bring to mind each project that came before.

That’s the idea behind Raina K’s Memory Loop Blanket.

It’s worked from the center out in a hexagon shape using brioche knitting. The pattern starts with Emily Ocker’s cast on and includes two color brioche as well as increases and decreases for shaping. It uses an I-cord bind off, which I’m sure takes forever but gives it a lovely finish.

The designer rates it as for an adventurous beginner or intermediate knitting, but having worked two color brioche before would be helpful.

The pattern sections are broken up by “airy interludes” worked in a fuzzier yarn and using the same color throughout.

The original pattern was worked in DK weight yarn with the airy interludes in fingering (which also makes them airy because the gauge is more open since it’s worked with the same needles as the rest of the shawl). You could use all fingering or sport weight if that’s what you have more leftovers of.

Of course in the original the same two colors are used for a full pattern section, but if this is truly a leftovers project you may end up using more colors in each section, which could also be fun. And of course because it’s worked from the center out you can just keep knitting to make it as big as you like and go until you run out of yarn. The designer suggests you might need multiple long circular needles to deal with the number of stitches you’ll end up with.

As shown the blanket is about 43 inches/110 cm in diameter from one corner across to another. It looks super cozy and would be a great use for all those memories you’ve been holding onto!

You can find the pattern on Ravelry.

[Photo: Raina K]

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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