Knitting

Free Patterns, Tutorials and Project Ideas

Wrap Yourself in Colorful Shawls

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wrapped in color

Mary D is getting this one.

Koigu is known for making fantastic, colorful yarns. These colorful skeins are fun to collect, but if you aren’t sure how to use them in projects, check out Wrapped in Color: 30 Shawls to Knit from the yarn company’s founders, Maie and Taiu Landra.

The book includes triangular, rectangular, crescent-shaped, square and sleeved shawls, capes, wraps and shrugs. There is lace, a lot of drop-stitch projects and a few pretty simple Garter and Stockinette based projects as well.

These patterns are colorful, mostly easy to intermediate in skill level, lots of fun to knit and wear. Check out the projects on Ravelry and look inside the book at the publisher’s website.

If you’d like a chance to win this book, leave a comment on this post before the end of the day Sunday, May 28. I’d love to know if you knit a lot of shawls and if you have a favorite pattern you’ve knit so far. I found Hitchhiker a lot of fun, and the one I designed, if you can even call it that, that I like the most is my Bulky Triangle Wrap.

Thanks for visiting, commenting and sharing, and good luck!

 

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Looking for more amazing shawl patterns? Check out these Knitting patterns we found on Etsy.

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Comments

  2. I have only knit one shawl so far, but I have plenty more in my Ravelry queue!

  3. I can’t tell you how many onesie-and-twosie skeins of Koiku are languishing in my stash looking for EXACTLY one of these patterns. I would love this!

  5. I’ve knit several shawls and do wear them quite a bit in the winter. I don’t have a clear favorite, just finished Leetal’s Robin and am really looking forward to wearing it next winter.

  6. Thank you for the giveaway! I mostly crochet shawls, but would like to try some knitted ones.

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]