A New Project in the Works

My life of the last week hasn't been entirely about spinning. It's also been about working on my Jaywalker socks (I'm about to start the heel flap of the second sock -- I haven't weighed my remaining yarn, but I'm pretty sure I'm not going to face any shortages), my Melody shawl (the mammoth ball of lace weight finally seems to be getting smaller), and getting started on a new project for John, the Stained Glass scarf from Handknit Holidays.

The Beginnings of a Stained Glass Scarf

In a surprising move for me, I am doing this project in exactly the colors shown in the book. Why? Well, the scarf is for the man of the house and when he said he liked the scarf (probably because a man is shown wearing the scarf in the book) and liked the colors of the scarf in the book (I believe that brown and green are considered manly, even when the green is somewhat light and interrupted by a light red color, which we will emphatically NOT refer to as pink), I decided not to tempt fate. 2 skeins of Ultramerino 4 from Webs and 2 skeins of Ultramerino 6 from Lettuce Knit in Canada later, I got this scarf cast on for him and underway.

What makes this scarf interesting is that it is a double knit scarf. That means that there are actually two layers of knitting and that you can see a stockinette pattern on each side of the scarf (at least for this scarf, you could have reverse stockinette on both sides or stockinette on one and reverse stockinette on the other, the point is that there are two layers of knitting).

This pattern comes with two different explanations of how to make the scarf. One that essentially uses two color knitting techniques so that you do a complete row each time you go across, and one called the "slip and slide" method, where you work across the row with one color, slide the knitting back to the beginning (clearly a circular needle is required for this) and work your way across with the second color. Since I am still not so very good at two color knitting, and definitely don't enjoy two color purling (and I have misplaced the handy tool I used for knitting the beret) I opted for the second method. Knitting this scarf is very easy. I've had a few issues with carrying the yarn in back or in front of the stitches I am slipping (the ones not in the color you are currently knitting with), but otherwise, it's a simple knit.

Which is not to say that you can avoid paying attention to it, or that it moves quickly. But there's definitely nothing that should be too technically challenging on this project, even if you're new to knitting. If you can knit and purl, don't mind having two balls of yarn hanging off your work and are comfortable with the slow pace this project will move in (since you essentially have to knit each row twice), then you can do this project.

So far it's getting a cautiously positive response from the intended recipient. He's a little off-put by the fact that the skeins of Ultramerino 4 that I got have more light red than they have green, but since the light red does not approach a baby pink color, and since the chocolate brown Ultramerino 6 is clearly a man-acceptable color and since this scarf clearly will be both soft and warm, I think he will likely accept it when it's finished. Hopefully it will still be cold when that happens!