Striped with a Dotted Line - a double knit scarf
another boy-scarf
I can procrasinate with the best of them. A year or so I made this scarf for my friend Michael. I even wrote this lovely blog entry about it at the time with the pattern, materials and all... The scarf then sat at my house in a bag for much, much to long. I finally got my act together and mailed it out to him -- so here it is -- pattern, pictures and one-year-belated text:
Last year I made Michael a cool fair isle hat. This year, I made him a nice warm scarf to go along with it. Unfortunately I couldn't find the loden-colored Wool-Ease yarn, so I did gray instead. Hopefully it still looks ok with the hat.
I tried my best to make the stripes random widths throughout the scarf and a random order of colors. You'll be happy to know that I resisted the temptation to write a java program to make sure that the stripe widths and colors were a truly random distribution. And I also resisted the temptation to encode messages using base 3 values (kinda like binary but with the numbers 0, 1 and 2). Yes, I'm a geek, this I know.
This pattern uses double knitting. If you're not familiar with double knitting -- it basically gives you a double-thick scarf that has knit stitches on both the front and back of the work. This technique provides a lot of neat features to the scarf: it makes a really warm scarf, you can make some great patterns without having to worry about long floats, and double knit scarves don't curl! (Check out the other double knit scarf that I made a few months ago).
- materials:
- yarn: 3 balls of worsted weight yarn in contrasting colors. I used Lion's Brand Wool-Ease in Black, Wheat and Gray Heather.
- needles: one pair, size 8 needles.
- pattern:
- Cast on 30 stitches in color A (the scarf will only be 19 stitches wide, but you need double the stitches to cast on both the front and back)
- Row 1: Pick up color B. * Knit one stitch with Color A, purl the next stitch with color B. Repeat from * to the end of the row. When knitting be sure to bring BOTH strands of yarn to the back and when purling be sure to bring BOTH strands of yarn to the front. Check out the double knitting video on knittinghelp.com to learn more about the technique.
- Row 2: k with color B, p with color A, repeat for 19 stitches. k1 with color A, p1 with color B.
- Row 3: Knit all of color A's stitches with Color A, purl all of color B's stitches with Color B.
- Row 4: repeat row 2
- Row 5: repeat row 3
- Row 6 and beyond: use the color chart below to start off the scarf, then randmoly chose the colors and the dots. Make sure that each color section starts and ends with row 2.
- ...
- Bind off when you're happy with the length of the scarf. I used a modification of the basic knit bindoff method: k2tog, * k2tog, pass first stitch over second, repeat from *
| front | back |
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