Easy Little Pride Flag Knitting Patterns

We’re coming up on the end of Pride month, but Pride is every day, all the time, and crafting for Pride doesn’t have to be limited to a particular month of the calendar.

Knit Picks recently released on its Instagram page a collection of little Pride flags, with all the instructions and color charts to make a bunch of different offerings. You can use this design to make the traditional rainbow striped flag, of course, but there’s also a chart for the Progress flag.

There are also charts for the demiromantic/demisexual flag and the intersex flag. Other flags just have stripes but the pattern shows the layout for a variety of flags, including:

lesbian
gay men
bisexual
trans
pansexual
nonbinary
aromantic
agender
asexual

The pattern for the flags is included in the post. Each flag is just 24 stitches wide, so you can make one or a bunch in no time. It suggests using Knit Picks Palette yarn held double, or you can use a DK or worsted weight yarn. Whatever you have in the right colors will work.

The original pattern uses size 6 US (4mm) knitting needles, but you can adjust as needed for the particular yarn you are using. This of course may alter the size of your finished flag, but bigger and smaller flags are cute, too. (As written the flag should come out to about 4.5 by 3.5 inches, but gauge isn’t critical.)

Looking for more knits to show your pride? Check out my collection of rainbow knitting patterns that are great for Pride or any other time of year. (Actually I did one last year, too, so check out even more rainbow patterns here.)

Thanks, Knit Picks, for being awesome all year long and providing yarn in a rainbow of colors for all our stitching needs.

[Photo: Knit Picks, via Instagram]

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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