One of the most common questions..

..that new knitters ask themselves, is ‘what to knit with this yarn?’. If you’re already an experienced knitter, imagine for a second you just learned how to knit. You walk into a yarnstore for the first time and are overwhelmed by the choice. There are SO MANY yarns! How on earth do you know which yarns to pick? Usually you’ll have someone with you to choose your first ever yarns to knit with, but that first time you have to make this decision by yourself can be quite intimidating. You end up choosing a yarn in colours you like, pick up one ball, and go to the checkout. Later, you’re sat at home, with that one ball of yarn in front of you, and you think to yourself:

But what do I make with it?

I get asked this question all the time, whether by experienced knitters who are delving into deep stash and finding this odd ball of yarn, or by newer knitters who don’t really know yet how to find a suitable pattern for your yarn. Luckily there’s an easy solution for this problem! The only information you need to know, is the yarn brand and range.

For instance, the yarn shown here is from the brand Scheepjes, and of the Downtown range. Sometimes it’s not clear from a yarn label which is the brand name and which is the yarn range, but it doesn’t really matter for the solution that we’re going to use.

The Ravelry Yarn Search

If you haven’t yet discovered Ravelry, you are missing out! Ravelry is an amazing resource for knitters and crocheters. It’s a platform where designers offer knitting and crochet patterns, lots of which are free. And a brilliant function on this website is the yarn search function. On the Ravelry website, you click ‘Yarns‘ in the menu along the top, and then insert your yarn name into the search bar.

Let’s try it out! And we’ve actually got a case study for this article, so let’s see. A friend of mine has recently learned how to knit and asked me what pattern to use for the yarn ‘Katia Taika’, and he’s got 1 ball of it. He would love to knit a hat for his 2 year old son, which should be doable with just 1 ball. When we fill in the yarn name, we see these results:

Sometimes your search will yield multiple results, but most often you’ll be able to find the exact yarn you’ve got in your hands. We already see that this yarn is categorized as ‘DK’, which is a yarn weight category, and we see the fiber content of 75% Merino, 25% Nylon. Usually this information will also be on the yarn label. Let’s click the result to find out more.

From this screen, we can see at the top that there are 75 project with this yarn – which will be very useful for us! But more on that later. From the information in the center of the screen, we see that this yarn range is discontinued, which means it’s no longer being produced. It’s likely we won’t be able to get more of this yarn, so we’ll bear that in mind and not look for a project which uses more than 1 ball.

Below that it gives the yarn details: each ball has 400 meters (437 yards) and weighs 150 grams – quite a lot! The recommended needle size is 3 to 4mm.

The fiber content of 75% Merino Wool and 25% Nylon means it’s sturdy enough for socks, and probably also soft enough for hats, scarves and garments. Being able to machine wash it at 40 degrees Celsius means it will be relatively easy to care for.

Now, let’s look at the Projects tab to see if we can find any hats made with this yarn, and how many balls they’ve used.

From just these first few results on the Projects page we can already see a great deal. Knitters have used this yarn for socks, scarves, and garments. The amount of information we get, is based on which notes the knitter included in their project page. For the top right result, we see the pattern name ‘Sophie Scarf’, and that they’ve used approximately 200 meters which is about half a ball of Katia Taika. From here you could go through all 4 pages of projects, or we can search for more specific results.

At the top you can see a search bar, followed by the red button ‘Advanced Search’. Click this button, without having filled in anything into the search bar. Of course, we could already type in ‘hat’ here and see some results, but some hat projects may be called ‘beanie’ or ‘cap’, so it’s better to leave it blank for now.

On this screen, we see lots of filters on the lefthand side, and the project pictures on the right. Further down on the left, look for the filters ‘pattern category’. Click Accessories, then Hat, then ‘All Hat’.

Uh-oh! There are only 4 results, none of which are child sized hats. But from the project pages, it seems that people have been able to knit adult sized hats from 1 ball or less of this yarn, so that’s a good sign. We continue our pattern search in the ‘Patterns‘ tab on Ravelry. There are a LOT of patterns on Ravelry, and this can get overwhelming, so let’s stick with what we know about our next project.

My friend wants to knit a hat, not crochet, so we’ll choose ‘knitting‘ under the Personalize options. Then under the search bar, click ‘Advanced Search’, again leaving the search bar empty.

With 834,199 pattern options, let’s narrow it down a little 😉 We’ll use the filters on the lefthand side of your screen, just like before. Look for ‘Accessories’ again, then ‘Hat’, then ‘All Hat’.

Then, look for the ‘Weight’ filter on the left. Remember that the search results for Katia Taika yarn said ‘DK weight’? We’ll choose DK here.

To find hat patterns for a 2 year old, go to the Age / Size / Fit filter and for Age or Size, choose Toddler (1-3). That still leaves us with almost 5000 patterns to choose from.

Let’s narrow it down further by only choosing free patterns. Look for the ‘Availability’ filter and choose ‘free’.

While 576 pattern options is still a lot, you don’t have to look through all of it to find a pattern you like. Chances are you’ll find a pattern you will want to cast on within the first two pages. Looking at these results we can ignore the patterns that use more than one colour, because we have 1 single ball we’d like to use.

From this point on which pattern you go for is all personal preference, so I’ll leave you to browse patterns at your leisure. Be warned though – many knitters have lost hours and hours of just browsing Ravelry! At some point it’s best to just pick a pattern and go for it. If you’re in doubt, choose a pattern with a high number of projects (100+). The more projects it has, the more chance the pattern is easy to follow.

Want to help other knitters?

If you want to help other knitters find suitable patterns for their yarns, why not create a Ravelry project page yourself? More info on how to do that soon!