Hi there!
Where I grew up there were two yarn shops, and one of those was the one my mother went to, so that’s the one I went to as well. (It closed a while ago and now she - and I when I’m visiting - have to go to the “other” one but it’s okay, we got used to it ;-))
As it isn’t in a big town, the shop was quite small. They carried a few brands (Lana Grossa, Lang Yarns, Regia for sockyarn, Rico Design Yarn) and had always the most recent collection in. They were happy to order other colours or bigger amounts of yarn just for you.
When I still lived at home, I knitted almost exclusively socks. But sometimes my mother got a small pattern booklet or a calendar with patterns because she was a good customer and I fell in love with a pattern. Either I persuaded my mother to knit it or I would attempt to make it myself.
I used the yarn they had in the shop which wasn’t always what was recommended in the pattern. But the yarn shop owner and the other ladies working there were very helpful to substitute yarns.
From the moment I started knitting I was used to substitute yarns because it was the 90s (no internet) and a small town as well. Also, I liked to use leftover yarns from my mother’s stash.
When I started university and later when I worked at the university, there wasn’t too much money to spend on yarn. If I really wanted something special or a bigger amount for a project, I asked my parents for it for my birthday or Christmas.
Later I discovered indie dyed yarn and had more money to spend, so I sometimes used the yarn which was recommended in the pattern. But it’s more important to me to use yarn available to me and which I like (semitonal in a small range of colours). Because I tend to run warm, I never use anything thicker than Dk weight for garments. I prefer natural fibres.
One of the currently discussed topics in the knitting world is yarn substitution.
Knitters who don’t use the recommended yarn and especially those who substitute a much cheaper yarn for whatever reasons, are looked down upon and often attacked for their choices.
That isn’t fair at all! Everybody should be able to enjoy our shared hobby and make things they love with the material they can afford - because most often the reason to not use the trendy, indie dyed yarn is a lack of money.
I saw the discussion derail to asking dyers to decrease their prices which is entirely beside the point and not fair to them. I guess they don’t take enough money as it is.
But where do you as the designer come in?
Designers are asked to include a list of yarns usable for the pattern, not just the one you used for knitting your sample.
I can see where this is coming from - but I don’t quite agree with this solution.
Don’t get me wrong: I see where this demand is coming from and it would be nice to give a long list of yarn recommendations for a pattern.
But (most) knitting patterns are too cheap anyway and I think it’s not fair to ask the designer to put even more work into a pattern - and since a lack of money is the source of this whole discussion, the designer couldn’t even take more money for a pattern without losing the gained plus of accessibility again.
Here are a few reasons why I think including a list of recommended yarns can’t be the solution:
It requires research from the designer, so more time and higher costs - which you would to need to absorb yourself to avoid a loss of (financial) accessibility.
Knitters everywhere in the world want to knit your pattern - but you can’t be expected to check if recommended yarns are available everywhere and sometimes it’s not even possible.
How long should the list be? How many price points should be included? This is a bottomless pit.
The pattern might be in collaboration with a company, a magazine or an indie dyer. You can’t include other yarns in these cases.
So, what to do?
First of all: Everybody should mind their own business - which doesn’t include what another knitter knits with! Everybody uses the best materials they can afford and if that’s a very cheap yarn, it doesn’t matter.
It matters that they make stuff and enjoy doing that and wearing the product. And even if they make stuff out of necessity and don’t enjoy it too much, it doesn’t matter.
It’s not a reason to attack someone or look down on them!
Obviously, it matters that there is poverty and we need to work on that, but that is beyond what we can do here.
There are resources out there: online courses, books, a nifty website (www.yarnsub.com), the knitter can google the yarn properties and try to find a similar yarn (with Ravelry inaccessible to many people this isn’t really easy at the moment though).
In my opinion, a knitter should be able to substitute a yarn without more help from the designer. But that’s not where we are moving towards, knitting patterns get longer and longer and knitters expect more and more things included in a pattern.
Overall we should encourage knitters to take back responsibility for their knitting (e.g. finding resources to learn techniques).
We can’t change that trend over night but we can help knitters by changing the way we word things in knitting patterns.
These are the things currently routinely included in the yarn section of a pattern:
Yarn company, name of yarn
Composition of yarn
Weight of yarn (including the length of the unit the yarn comes in)
Amount of yarn needed, mostly in skeins or balls (or other unit)
Colour(s) used for sample
Gauge
Which may look like this:
YarnCompanyName YarnName (x m/yds per xx g / xx oz ball/skein; x% fibre1, x% fibre2, …)
x (x, x, x, x,…) balls/skeins used; sample uses colour x.
x sts /x rows /rounds = 10cm / 4in in stocking stitch, blocked
But we don’t lose any information by changing it to this:
xx weight woollen / cotton / acrylic / xx yarn, xx m / xx yds per xx g, in x shades/colours
A xx g
B xx g
etc.
Yarn used for the sample:
Rainbow Heirloom Heritage DK (75% Bluefaced Leicester; 25% Masham British Wool) in colours
A Wicked Pacific
B Submarine
But we could gain a knitter feeling that it is totally okay to substitute another yarn because what you used was “only” your choice for the sample.
We could make substitution even easier by including a bit more information:
In the pattern romance we could talk about what we want the knitted fabric to feel like, how it should drape or hold the shape a bit and why we use a specific yarn for this design.
To better describe the yarn weight we could include WPI (wraps per inch) if that’s available.
Knitters ask for giving the amount of yarn as meterage / yardage for a pattern. We need to be careful with this though: It looks more exact than it is. As you as designers know, this is always an estimate however you calculate it. You are used to include a buffer to allow for swatching and small differences in tension but this won’t always absorb the little differences between yarns.
What you can and should include is the information whether a skein / ball isn’t used in its entirety - contrast colours in colourwork, a partly needed second skein / ball, etc.
I’m sure there are other ideas to make the yarn section of your pattern more inclusive or provide help for substituting yarn elsewhere.
Did you already think about what you can do to help with this?
Let me know by replying to this post!
Frauke x