I wanted to take a break from mitten knitting and make myself something. A friend recently kidded me for wearing a “store bought” woven scarf. She said something along the lines of “why aren’t you wearing something you made?”
Truth: the scarves I’ve made were boring, or seemingly took forever to make. Or both. A possible solution? Make a neckwarmer instead!
I’ve had Jared Flood’s Morningside Neckwarmer in my queue for a long while, and aside from looking good, it has the added attraction of being in a stitch pattern of which I know nothing. Learning new knitting skills = not being bored with a project!
I cast on a few nights ago and by the second round had run into a brick wall. Naturally I kept going until the end of the third round (stubborn, or merely thick-headed? You decide!), and finally broke down and frogged it. I think that what had happened was that I dropped a stitch or made one too many yarnovers; at any rate, my stitch count was off and I couldn’t follow the stitch pattern, which depends on a slipped-stitch-and-YO combo being in the right place for a K2Tog on the next row.
After a second cast on (and I’m a fan of this double-strand cast on, it makes for a nice, even, comfy-looking edge) I started knitting again the next night. This time most of the stitches where where they should have been, and I was able to see what was going on with the fabric. Where I missed several YO in random places I was able to make a “save” by picking up the ladder and putting it where it should be. I’m about 12 rows in now, and if you ignore the bottom inch of the tube where I had some lingering problems, you can start to make out the ribbing from the brioche stitch.
I’ve never knitted in-the-round on a 16″ circular except when doing Magic Loop, which by now is my standard knitting method for most of my projects. I started wondering if this little 5″ circle would expand to fit over my head, so I transferred the work to a long cable from my Denise set. Uh, yeah. It’s very big. Much larger than I expected from the pattern photos. I’m going to knit until it’s the recommended five inches in length, then transfer to a longer cable and try the thing on, but I suspect that I’ll end up making this a lot taller than the pattern calls for, to give it a better chance to give me good coverage and warmth under my coat’s collar and at the top of the zipper.
