Usually, when following a knitting pattern, I use the exact yarn recommended as I’m always worried that it somehow won’t ‘work’ without it. However, having decided to knit my Mum a scarf for Christmas at the last minute and not having time to spend tracking down particular yarns, I thought it was time to be brave and try yarn substitution.
So, I picked my pattern and looked up the details of the recommended yarn on www.yarndex.com so that I could at least attempt to find something similar (a slightly fuzzy aran weight). So far so good. There was a small doubt in the back of my mind though. The photos of the scarf accompanying the pattern didn’t look like it had been knitted with aran weight yarn and definitely not with fuzzy yarn.
Undeterred, I bought two balls of the Wensleydale Longwool aran yarn, which I’ve mentioned before, and cast on.
The yarn was beautiful, the pattern pretty, the combination of the two …. bleugh!
Never mind, I had added lots of beautiful scarf patterns to my Ravelry queue earlier in the month when I thought I might eventually get around to knitting something for me again so I went back to the drawing board and started on a new pattern.
The yarn was still beautiful, the new pattern was pretty … and you can see where this is going, can’t you?
Again, despite the pattern claiming that it used aran weight yarn, that’s not what it looked like in the photos so I decided a change of approach was needed and went through my list looking for patterns that looked like they had been knitted with fuzzy aran. At last success with My So-Called Scarf.
Although all the pictures I’ve seen of this scarf have used variegated coloured yarns, the scarf looks beautiful in solid cream as well. It also uses nice big needles so is knitting up very quickly, a definite advantage when there’s less than a week to Christmas and you’re casting on a present for the 5th time!
Fingers crossed that I don’t change my mind again!