Scarves

 Hi all -

Spring is definitely in the air! Where I live, this time of year we flip-flop between snow and beautiful spring days. We had another almost a foot of snow last Friday, and now the temperature at my house is 51F so most of the snow is gone. We're supposed to get more snow later this week. For now, I'm enjoying the sunshine! 

This week I mainly worked on a couple of scarves. I had purchased yarn last summer to make a crochet scarf that I had seen on "Knit and Crochet Now!" on PBS. You can get the patterns from the show for free from their Web site. The Web site is part of the Annie's Web site, so I ordered some yarn from them to "pay" for the pattern and for the things that I've learned from their show. They didn't have the yarn recommended in the pattern, but they had some pretty bright yarn of the same weight, so I ordered that. I started making that scarf (the Carnelian Stripe Scarf designed by Lena Skvagerson) this week:

Carnelian Stripe Scarf

I got the first set of rows done and it's going well now, but the start was quite a bear! I found the yarn to be very slick and to split very easily. When I put my hook in the back loop of the chain to make the first stitches, it would distort the neighboring chains. Then when I tried to find the next chain to work into, I couldn't figure out where to put my hook. I tried several times and couldn't get it to work, but then I figured out I could make the chain and then put removable stitch markers in the back loop of each of the chains where I would be making a stitch and the stitch marker would hold the chain in place until I made the stitches. That worked great! I didn't have enough stitch markers to put in all of the chains I would be using before I started, so I put in all of my stitch markers at the beginning of the chain and then would move the markers after working in about 5 or 6 chains until I had all of the chains set up. Because of the way this pattern is worked, the slipperiness of the yarn won't cause problems for the rest of the pattern and I'll just have to be careful about not splitting the yarn as I work. After finishing a row of each of the colors, I decided to put this project aside for a couple of weeks. The Grocery Girls podcast is having a "granny square-along" starting next month and this scarf uses the stitch you use for granny squares so I think it will count for the crochet-along. Since there are prizes available in the crochet-along and the timing works so well, I might as well wait until that starts before finishing this project. I probably won't win anything, but it's always worth a try!

When I put this aside, I decided to try another crochet scarf using the same yarn. I wanted to get a feel for whether the problems I was having were because of the yarn or because of my inexperience with crocheting. I tried starting the Crazy for Cables Scarf designed by Amy D. Brewer. I used the same trick with the stitch markers in the starting chain and that worked well again. But as I got into the pattern, I got confused about where I should be making my stitches. I decided to rip this out and try again some other time, using some yarn that works better for me. Reducing the problems will help me figure things out, but I'll do that at some later time.

But I really wanted to get a handle on how usable this yarn I bought from Annie's will be. So I decided to work on a knit scarf. Since I'm much better at knitting than at crochet, this will give me a better feel for this yarn. So I made the Leaf of Life Knit Scarf designed by Lena Skvagerson:

Leaf of Life Knit Scarf

I had a much better time knitting with this yarn than crocheting with it! It was easier to control the splitting because I'm better at knitting; and the slickness of the yarn didn't bother me because the knitting needles keep the neighboring stitches in place. The result was a really soft and spongy scarf that I think will be a wonderful Christmas present for a family member! Once I finish the first scarf, I'll play around with knitting some of the colors in the other scarf to see how they hold up to knitting. As I've learned from sewing and other crafts, different color dyes affect thread, yarn, etc in different ways. The darker yarn I used for this scarf feels a little less slick than the other colors so that might be part of what made this yarn better. I think the other colors will still work well with knitting, but I need to try it to see for sure.

Finally, I pulled out my Chronos necklace, designed by Laura Nelkin and finished that project:

Chronos

Chronos close-up

I had put this project aside after creating the medallion because I had to dig out a very small double-pointed knitting needle to make the start for the strap as neat as possible and I never got around to finding that. But I knew this would be a quick project to finish and if I finished it by last weekend then I could use it to get another chance to win the big prize for Laura Nelkin's knit-along. The big prize is a set of wonderful knitting needles that I would like to win, but there are a lot of entries so my chances are pretty slim. But it worth a try!!

That's it for this week. I hope everyone is doing well!!

Nancy