Completed: Pseudo Shibori Scarf... Sort Of

It's been so long since I finished a knitting project that I actually had to refresh my memory of how to cast off. How embarrassing is that?

I started this project just before school started... last year. Yep, I've been working on the same project for over a year. I had just picked up knitting again over the summer, and had been going through projects like crazy. In less than two months, I knitted a pair of fingerless gloves, three scarves, a hat, and a purse, so I figured I was ready for a more ambitious project. 

Source

I bought the book Boutique Knits by Laura Irwin (before I knew about Ravely) for its hats. But, I had just finished the Sideways Grande Hat and wanted to try something different. I decided on the Pseudo Shibori Scarf in purple kidsilk (70% super-kid mohair, 30% silk). This stuff feels amazing - if it didn't take forever, I would use it for everything I knit. It looks so delicate but feels so cozy.

Oops, I just realised that I got carried away adjusting the white balance in this one and the colour is a little wonky. The other ones are closer to its actual colour.

It was going well enough, and then... well, school started. I don't think I knit again until Christmas break, and even then I didn't knit very much. It wasn't until I had the flu that I really picked it up again, once I was feeling slightly better but not well enough to go to school. For the entire year, I pretty much only knit when I was at home sick (which was quite a bit, mind you. My immune system hates me). Other than that, I knit pretty sporadically, and spent a lot more time sewing than knitting. Once summer school started, I would bring my knitting with me and knit after I finished tests (I'm pretty sure everyone in my class thought I was a bit odd...). More recently, I've started trying to fit it in whenever I can because I just wanted to finish.

But ta-dah! I'm finally done! I'm pretty happy about it, but I'm also looking forward to a project that's not done with laceweight yarn and 3.5 mm needles. Seriously, it's like knitting with thread. I kept track of my rows, and I did 446 of them. That's 24,084 stitches. Yikes.

The construction is pretty straightforward as long as you keep track of your rows. It's a horizontal rib pattern, which gives it a subtle texture, and knit diagonally (increasing on one side, decreasing on the other).

Now, you may notice that mine's a little different from the picture, hence the "sort of" in the title. By the time I finished it, I really couldn't have been bothered with the ruching. I had made it a length that I liked, and I would have had to make it longer if I wanted to ruche it. I figured that it had enough texture already. It's subtler than with the ruching, but it's still there. I also skipped the tabs, which I wasn't crazy about in the first place.

Overall, I'm really happy with it, and very relieved to be able to start something new. It's very cozy, yet very elegant, and I think it'll get a lot of wear. I definitely made some mistakes, but the nice thing about thin yarn and tiny needs is that the stitches are so small that mistakes (which I made many of) aren't very noticeable (the exception being the strange lump on the left side of this picture, which I will eventually try to block. I don't even know what happened there).

Can you spot the mistakes? There's four of them!

There's no pictures of me wearing it because it takes a serious chunk of time for a full photoshoot, and I've been pretty busy lately. And besides, the scarf looks the same whether I'm wearing it or not. I mean, I'm not going to show off my amazing job of fitting it to myself because, um, it's a scarf. Just take my word for it that fits.

My failed attempt at an artistic photo...

So what's next? Well, I have this gorgeous hand dyed, hand spun wool that was a birthday present last fall. It's BFL (bluefaced leicester) wool, which I had never heard of before, but it's amazingly soft. 

I haven't decided what to make with it yet, any ideas? I estimated that I have around 90 metres. I might make a matching hat and cowl set, because although I can mix-and-match most of my knitted accessories because they're similar colours, I don't have any that truly match. I just need to find a pattern, so suggestions would be really appreciated! They don't have to be matching patterns, I just want to make them in the same wool. I think I'll make the hat first, because the cowl I can finish whenever I run out of wool... that's a little harder to do with a hat! 

Ideally I need a pattern that uses 8 mm needles (that's what the woman who spun it said would look best), but I tend to knit pretty tightly so 9 or 10 mm would probably be fine. I would describe the wool as bulky or super bulky, not sure which. The tag in the photo above is a standard size business card, and it's attached with a piece of worsted weight yarn, for comparison purposes.

Thanks for reading! And if you have any pattern suggestions that would be great!