Finished Object

by Sunita

Yes indeed, my first knitting FO in I don’t know how long. Ages. I wanted to get back to knitting, and I have a stash of great yarn and half a dozen WIPs (works in progress). This scarf hasn’t been in the pile for that long, and it was mostly done, so it was a good way to get back on the wagon.

When I was in England on holiday last summer I went to a small yarn store and picked up some not-exactly-local yarn. We were in Cambridge and the yarn is from West Yorkshire Spinners. I’d never knitted with Blue Faced Leicester, so I picked up a couple of DK-weight skeins in brown.

Two skeins gave me 450+ yards, so I figured I could make a small-to-medium sized scarf from them. I wanted a pattern that had just enough variation to keep me occupied without requiring me to count and use a ton of stitch markers, and I’d been stockpiling asymmetric styles. After falling down the Ravelry hole for a while, I landed on Groovy, which is a very flexible pattern and can accommodate a lot of yarn weights and sizes.

The pattern is quite simple, with alternating panels of knit and purl. You increase every row and cast off a few stitches every 10 rows. I had less yarn than called for, so I knew I would wind up with a smaller scarf, but I used a slightly larger needle (which I often do to get a fabric with more drape) and wound up with 10 repeats of the pattern.

Behold the unblocked version:

unblocked groovy

That little blob above the scar is the amount of yarn I had left over. Not bad! I liked the ripples a lot, but the ends were too curled in on themselves and I wanted the scarf to be bigger (this is almost handkerchief-scarf sized). So I blocked it with my handy blocking wires, leaving the edge with the castoffs free:

blocked groovy

It’s not as asymmetrical as I thought it would be, but I like it a lot. The wool is softer after being wet-blocked (I used a tiny bit of very gentle shampoo in the water), and I think it will be a great scarf to tuck into the neckline of jackets and heavier sweaters. The color isn’t quite accurate in the photo; it’s a lovely medium brown with a slightly grey tone (it’s undyed BFL).

Now on to the next WIP!