Yes, Men Knit, and It’s Not Even Shocking

This may be the first time ever I’ve seen a story about men knitting in a major publication that didn’t have the tone of “What? Men can knit?”

This piece from the Wall Street Journal is about a men’s knitting group formed as part of the summer knitting group at Bryant Park in New York City (there’s been a knitting meetup there every Tuesday through the summer, and today is the last one). It’s sponsored by Knitty City, and owner Pearl Chin said she thought it was important to reach out to male knitters because women knit everywhere and often in groups while the guys tend to knit solo.

It’s a really lovely story, and the video shows several of the men sharing their knitting stories and what they get out of it. One knit his child booties for years, while another picked it up as a creative outlet at the side of his mother, a seamstress.

The story but not the video includes Jared Flood, aka Brooklyn Tweed, who says he’s still a relatively solitary knitter because “I think for men who are knitting, there’s such a stigma with it still,” he said.

I hope more nice stories like this will remind people who don’t knit that it’s perfectly normal and a wonderful use of your time, no matter who you are.

[Photo by Natalie Keyssar for the Wall Street Journal.]

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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