In today’s article, I’ll be sharing with you four key things to consider when making a yarn substitution so that you can be sure to achieve the look, the feel, and the overall esthetic that you’re going for with your knitting, whether that be to model exactly what you see in the sample or to do something completely different and unique with that design. So grab your refreshment, get comfortable, and let’s dive in. Hello, hello, and welcome to the Wool Needles Hands Midweek Ramble. My name is Taylor and I will be your host in today’s article. I am reaching into the tip line over@woolneedleshands.com where suggestions are left by viewers like you for articles that they would like to see me produce in the future. This one is one I get a lot and it surrounds the topic of yarn substitution.

I am tackling that today and I’m narrowing in on a few key details and I want to make this clear up front. The two details that I’m not going to cover here are yarn weight and gauge. So it happens all too often. Folks will cast onto a project, start working up the project, and even before the project is finished, they start noticing that things just aren’t right. It doesn’t drape the same way that they were hoping it to drape. It doesn’t feel the same. Perhaps the overall project just feels much more heavy than they were expecting it to feel based on the overall kind of experience that they’ve had with the project thus far, meaning photos in the pattern, somebody else who has knit it and they’ve seen a sample of it knit up, all of these things just may not be lining up.

And that can lead to really massive disappointment, especially if you’ve invested in a sweater quantity of yarn, or any quantity of yarn for that matter, to put into the project. And so for today, what I want to share with you are four key elements of yarn substitution that I believe can either make or break your finished object. Those four things are fiber content, color, texture, and density. Okay, let’s start with fiber content. If a pattern calls for a particular fiber content in their yarn, that’s not the pattern designer saying that you can only knit this kind of garment with this fiber content. What it is saying, though, is that if you want to knit the this garment or this piece of knitwear and you want it to drape like this and look like this, you’re going to want to use a similar fiber content.

So it’s really important to understand that right away. So we’re going to Begin with cellulose fiber. A cellulose fiber is a fiber that is created from plants. It could be cotton, linen, flax, hemp, all of these cellulosic based materials are what go into a cellulose fiber, the most common and familiar of which would be cotton. So this is knit picks, comfy sport weight cotton and well, I should correct that. It’s actually 75% Pima cotton and 25% acrylic, but it is majority cotton. So it’s going to behave in, you know, majority like a cotton would behave. And a cotton is dense, it doesn’t stretch, it’s not resilient like wool is. It doesn’t have any of those feel features that make wool wearable for a long time. It’s not self cleaning, it doesn’t contain lanolin.

So there’s lots of things about cotton that are so greatly different from wool. So this is 100% untreated American wool. This is a yarn also by knit picks called High Desert. I’ll link to all these yarns that I mention in the show notes, which you can find by scanning the QR code that I popped up at the beginning. These two yarns, if knit into the same project, will behave differently in the project. If you’re making a hat with this yarn here, it’s not going to stretch, it’s not going to spring back to shape.

But if you knit that same hat with this yarn, considering that it’s made of a protein fiber wool, it is going to have that resiliency, it is going to maintain its shape, it’s going to stretch, but it’s going to maintain that shape overall because it is 100% untreated wool and cellulosic fibers, across the range of available options between linen, hemp and cotton, they can behave differently from one another as well. So you really have to pay att to the variations in the textures of those yarns. Now, even within the range of cellulose fibers, those different kinds of fibers, whether it comes from cotton, linen, flax, hemp, those can all behave much differently from one another as well. And so you really have to consider those various characteristics.

For example, this is a hemp merino yarn, but it has a considerable amount of hemp fiber in here. And you can see all of those little undyed strands of hemp fiber, how wiry they are, they have a halo to. They do have a little bit more of a resiliency, not quite as much as wool, but it does give a little bit more of a stretch. But these two yarns behave very differently from one another and they are both cellulosic based yarns.

You really want to remember that if a pattern calls for sheep’s wool, that you want to stick with sheep’s wool, because other species, like the camelid species, like a llama or an alpaca or a yak or something like that’s going to provide you with a fiber that has a lot of different characteristics that are not going to match up with the characteristics of wool. For ex alpaca. Alpaca is not very resilient. It’s much warmer in a lot of cases, but it doesn’t have that resiliency. In fact, it has a propensity for just growing and stretching out as you wear it.

It has a beautiful drape and it’s lovely for projects that don’t require that kind of structure, like shawls or drapey shirts that don’t need to fit very well and they’re not going to be put under pressure and tension, all of these various different things. But when it comes to replacing a wool fiber with something made from alpaca, that’s typically a mistake. Unless of course, you know what you’re doing and you’re making an educated decision and you understand what you can expect. So as beautiful as alpaca is, and as lovely as that halo is, and scrumptious and buttery soft as the fiber is, it’s just not going to behave the same. And as its wool counterpart, you also want to consider whether or not the yarn includes synthetic or man made fibers such as acrylic or polyester.

Acrylic is a great substitute for wool because it behaves in a lot of the same ways that wool behaves. Outside of the fact that it feels slightly different on the skin. It doesn’t wick moisture away from the skin like wool does. It’s not self cleaning, but it is washable, so it is different. There are some differences that for some people are very obvious and for some people, they don’t notice the difference and they are fine with that. If you have a wool allergy or you just are on a budget or perhaps you’re knitting for washability and you don’t want to use the superwash wool, you would rather use acrylic. Whatever your reasons are, acrylic is a really fantastic substitute for a wool yarn.

But it is important to remember any kind of differences that may be present if you are going for a particular aesthetic that’s present in the photos or on the sample of the particular pattern that you are setting out to knit. Another big one to consider here is color. Perhaps we already have an idea of our color preferences, or maybe we would want to use a really simple design as an opportunity to punch up the color and use a really splashy yarn. Or maybe what’s really drawing our attention to a particular design is the nature of the color. Because it’s a really rustic solid, or because it’s a really splashy variegated yarn, or because it’s kind of a little bit of both, that might be what’s drawing our attention and inspiring us.

And if that is the case, whatever yarn, we choose to substitute the yarn in the pattern, if that’s what we’re doing, we want to stick to that style, to that overall aesthetic. Because there is a big difference between a variegated yarn like this and a solid yarn like this. Take it from me, I’m a yarn dyer. I can tell you from experience, it’s just not the same experience. Take it from anybody who has knit with hand dyed yarn. They will tell you are in for a much different experience if you are knitting with a variegated speckled yarn as opposed to something that is tonal or solid. Not only that, there’s techniques that you might need to be considering. If you decide to take what is a solid pattern and knit with a variegated yarn, you may need to consider alternating skeins.

Maybe you need to learn about helical knitting. Maybe you don’t care and you’re just going to knit everything together and what happens with the color happens. All of those things are equally acceptable, but those are things that you might want to consider before choosing a particular yarn color for a particular project. Texture is a big one, especially right now because we are seeing so many new textures coming onto the scene. I mean, you have things that are woolen spun, you have things that aren’t even spun. You have really nice, smooth, worsted spun yarns. So, so smooth that they almost look like they contain silk, but they don’t contain any. You have some yarns that have little bits and bobs spun into the yarn. You have single ply yarns.

All of these things need to be taken into consideration because some of those things even contribute to the next element I’m going to be talking about, which is density. But let’s go ahead and stick with texture for a moment because there’s a big difference depending on the yarn that you’re choosing for your project. Okay, I just brought over a bunch more examples. Texture. It’s a big One. Let’s begin with one that is kind of all over the place right now, and that is worsted versus woolen spun. Worsted spun yarn means that prior to the yarn being turned into yarn, the fleece was combed. And I don’t know all the ins and outs of how this works, so I’m going to give you a very layman’s perspective on this. Imagine that you are about to braid your hair.

You have long, flowing hair, whoever you happen to be, and you’re going to get up in the morning from a very active night’s sleep, and you’ve got bedhead and everything, and you’re going to get your hair braided. You’re going to braid it, make it look put together. Now, if you are planning a worsted spun braid, you’re going to comb your hair, you might even dampen it first to make sure all of the strands of hair are lining up parallel to one another, nice and neat. So that when you braid your hair, you have a nice clean braid. And that might be what you’re going for, that really nice, sleek, you know, aesthetic. But you may also be in the woolen spun camp and you get up, bed head and everything and choose not to comb your hair.

You’re just going to take all of those locks of hair, they’re going all which way, and you’re going to twist them into a braid. There’s obviously different locks being braided together, but it’s a little bit more fuzzy. You have a little bit of variation. There’s yarns that are kind of sticking. Things are just not as organized as the worsted spun braid. That’s woolen spun. It’s the same thing. It’s just processed differently to make yarn as opposed to braided hair. So if you can imagine it like that kind of lets you know a little bit of the difference between those two types of yarns and how different those textures are going to be. This is a woolen spun yarn by Green Mountain Spinnery. I’m going to hold it up right here so you can get a look at it.

You can kind of see that it has a spongy texture to it. It looks almost. It looks like it’s made of just like little fuzzy bits of yarn put together in plies. And I mean, in some ways that’s what it is. And here is a worsted spun yarn. This is high desert by knit picks. And you can see that it’s a little bit more sleek, it’s a little bit more put together. And honestly, I Don’t even know if this is the greatest example. I do know that it’s worsted spun. I’m gonna grab a different example. Okay, here we are. So we have our woolen spun here, and this is Patton’s classic wool worsted. This is a worsted spun. There’s a lot less of that sponginess happening, but here you see a lot more of that spongy variation. Isn’t that interesting?

And that texture can really impact the overall look of your piece that you’re working on. Let’s just add that to the yarn mountain. So whether it’s asking for a worsted spun or a woolen spun, those two things, if you are swapping one for the other, isn’t going to make a huge overall difference in the project. One may end up being significantly heavier or lighter than the other, but I am of the opinion that you can substitute those out pretty cleanly one for the other. However, if you’re trying to snap, stay true to the design, and you really want the aesthetic featured in the design, you want to consider that next you can have things like this. This is unspun yarn. This is nuted in. This is an unspun pencil roving yarn, and it is all the rage right now.

And if a pattern calls for new tadin yarn, doubled or tripled or even held by itself in a particular weight, and you try to sub out this yarn, you know whether it’s held double or triple with a yarn in that same weight category, but that is a woolen spun or worsted spun yarn. You are going to have a vastly different piece. It doesn’t mean that one’s going to better than the other. It’s just meaning that it’s not going to match the piece that was shown, you know, as a sample for that pattern. Because this is such a unique yarn with a unique construction or lack thereof, it’s just very different.

And so if you see a pattern that is suggesting a very unique yarn, something that has very particular characteristics, you’re really going to want to stick with that if you’re hoping to achieve the look featured in the pattern. Another example would be this. This is a chained yarn or a blown yarn. I think I might be using chained incorrectly, but I always have felt like this is called, like a chainette yarn because you have this chain of fiber and then there’s other fiber, blown chain giving it that blown effect. Now, this is a bulky weight yarn, and this is much different than, say, this bulky weight yarn. This one is obviously going to be different in texture, and then, of course, density, which we’re going to talk about in just a minute. But these are two totally different things.

So if a pattern calls for this and you’re subbing it out for this, which is Patton’s classic roving, your overall finished object is just going to be different. So you have to consider the texture. Okay, the. The last thing that you really want to consider here is density, which is the difference in weight of what is essentially the same length of yarn. So imagine that you have two skeins of yarn, one and two, and they are both made up of 50 yards. One weighs more than the other, making it more dense. There’s more material there contributing to a heavier yarn and contributing to a whole different experience when it comes to your knitting.

That overall density is going to determine whether or not that garment style sits on your body the way that it sits on the body of the model featured in the pattern. Something that is knit using woolen spun yarn in the same quantity as perhaps a worsted spun counterpart is going to be lighter in weight because there’s so much more air in this yarn. So you might see a beautiful cabled cardigan, like some of those really gorgeous ones that you see on Brooklyn Tweed’s website, and you see the model wearing it almost like effortlessly. Well, if you were to knit that same cabled cardigan in a really dense worsted weight yarn, maybe something that contained a little acrylic like this one does, we’re talking a lot more weight, a lot more density.

And because it’s a cabled cardigan, just a really heavy garment that’s not going to be as effortless to wear. So you really want to consider that. And this is one of the reasons why I think we see a lot of these really gorgeous cabled pieces by Brooklyn Tweed or other companies that employ woolen spun yarn, is because the yarn can do it. The yarn can work up into these really gorgeous color work and cabled pieces that require a lot of yarn without being incredibly heavy. And so that’s the benefit or one of the benefits of woolen spun yarn. But it is really important to consider that. And if you were to substitute a woolen spun yarn for, you know, a yarn that included some linen or some silk, we’re adding even more weight because cellulosic fibers are heavier than protein fibers, generally speaking.

So you really want to consider the density of your fiber. Okay, a really quick way that I want to demonstrate for you how density can greatly contribute to the overall weight of an item is with kind of a simple example, just because of the materials that I have here. So this is called daisy chain. It is a super bulky overall weight yarn that is single ply hand spun by knit collage. This is by funim. It is the same gauge and it is a hand spun woolen yarn. It’s actually its purpose is for tapestry weaving. Same gauge breakdown. This is five yards. This is 60 yards. And now this is only five yards. And this weighs 99 grams. So what that means is that each yard is 20 grams. Hold that this 60 yards. This one weighs 51 grams. That is 0.85 grams per yard.

So you have 19 grams per yard for the first here and you have 0.85 grams per yard here. Now, just for argument’s sake, let’s say that you find a really beautiful pattern using knit collage daisy chain, which is this right here. And the pattern calls for 200 yards of this. But you have 200 yards of this in your stash and you want to use it. So you’re going to sub out this yarn for this yarn. And you want to be able to wear the hat effortlessly, just like you see the model wearing it in the picture. So you choose this yarn and you knit up your hat only to realize that 200 yards of this is 170 grams. But 200 yards of this is roughly 3,800 grams of yarn. That is a big difference in density and just overall weight.

Now, of course, this is a very extreme example, but this is an example that really goes to show that the density of the yarn that you’re choosing is going to affect the overall weight of the garment. So you really want to take that into consideration when choosing a yarn. And one simple way that you can do this is to take the overall weight of the yarn and divide that by the yardage or the meterage. That number needs to be very similar, if not spot on to the side. Same number achieved the same way with the yarn called for in the pattern. That way you know that the yarns you’re choosing are similar weight and similar density. Okay, so I cleared off my table because I just remembered that I have a pretty interesting example of how density can affect a project.

So I have two sweaters back here. These are the same design. This is the Felix pullover by Amy Christophers. This particular sweater was knit with 100% merino wool paired with kid mohair silver silk. So this is a skein of kid mohair silk lace weight yarn paired with a worsted weight 100% merino wool, giving Me an overall Aran weight yarn in general. So that’s what I have right here. This one is the same design knit with one strand of kid mohair silk and one strand of unspun yarn, not unlike the one that you see here. This is Newton unspun yarn. You can see how lightweight this is. I mean, this is just airy as I’ll get out because the yarn density that I used between these two projects are so vast and so different in characteristic.

These sweaters are very different in the way that they wear, in the way that they drape. This is a very lightweight, airy sweater. It kind of sits and floats on my body. It doesn’t have weight to it really. It doesn’t pull down against my shoulders. It just kind of sits there. Is really airy, is really lightweight and lovely. This one is beautiful in its drape. It has a really lovely weight to it. It wears over my shoulders really nicely with a really nice drape. And you can just see it as I hold it up. You can kind of see the way that it ripples when I move it like this. If I do the same thing to this one, you don’t see that same kind of dense rippling happening. And that’s because it’s so lightweight. It just kind of floats.

The weight of these is actually quite different. So let’s go ahead and use my scale. Here’s my first. Now, there’s going to be slight variations to what I did. Like, the sleeves on this one are slightly shorter, so that should be considered as well. But we’re going to look for an overall difference in weight here. So this is 211 grams. This. Get it all on there is 383 grams. That’s a big difference. That is over three skeins of yarn. That’s almost four skeins of yarn worth of weight in this sweater, more so than this sweater. So that’s a big deal. So that’s something I wanted to show, just to kind of emphasize how yarn density can play a big role in the way a particular piece wears on your body and feels on your body, how effortless it feels when you wear it.

So it’s really important to consider these particular elements of yarn. When you’re thinking about substituting, you need to consider the fiber content, the color, the texture, the density. And that doesn’t mean that you have to stick to those things and keep those things the same. It just means that if you’re going for the look of the sample in the photos, you are going to want to stick to those things. Maybe you’re trying to get a different look. Maybe you’re trying to take your garment and have it be much more lightweight than what you see in the photos. So you’re going to choose your yarn accordingly based on those four elements that I mentioned here.

That’s going to provide you with a lot of understanding and knowledge that’s going to help you make decisions for what you want your garment to do, whether that’s to be exactly like the sample or to be something completely different. At least now you know what to consider when it comes to making those adjustments yourself and being in control of your knitting. I find that the more we learn about the materials that we use, the more power we have to make decisions and that fit us and our needs and our aesthetic. And this is just an example of that, choosing the right materials to get the results that you’re looking for. I hope that you took something valuable from this article today. It means so much to me to be here sharing this with you.

If you did find value in this article or enjoyed yourself at any point, please don’t forget to give the article a thumbs up. Definitely subscribe and click the bell icon so you can be notified anytime. I upload new content here on the channel, which is every Wednesday and every Sunday except for next week. I will be taking a break, so the Wool Needles Hands channel will be dark next week as I take a break and recharge my batteries, but I will be back the following week with your regularly scheduled content. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here with me today. I love spending this time with you guys until we meet again on Sunday for the next episode of the podcast. Happy Knitting, Happy making happy whatever it is that you’re doing.

Take care, be well and I will see you soon. Bye.