Last week's project

I finally finished a scarf I've been working on for my husband's birthday.  He loves to tease me that I'm a knitwear designer but I've never made him anything.  I did make him a hat once to wear when he goes running but it turned out to be a little small.  He actually agreed that he'd wear a scarf if I made one (we'll see).  The scarf is based on a design by Martin Storey in Rowan Magazine 48.  I was intrigued by this chain design and wanted to learn how to do the stitch so that I could incorporate it into my own designs.  While I love the crazy length of the original version, I knew there was no way hubby would EVER be caught dead in public with a scarf that long so I altered the size a little.

Here's the original design from Rowan Magazine 48:

I love hugely textured knits and this magazine has a whole collection of luscious knitwear that sent my brain spinning with ways I could incorporate the stitches into my own designs.

Here's my shorter version of the Rowan scarf.

I found a gorgeous alpaca/cotton blend yarn (coincidentally Rowan alpaca cotton) in a lovely shade of blue to complement hubby's eyes.  I think'll I'll make myself a cowl with the leftover yarn now that I've got the stitch pattern memorized.

It's a fairly simple rib stitch pattern but the face side knit ribs are knit through the back loop which helps the rib stand up more from the background purl stitches.  The reverse side of the pattern uses a purl through the back loop on those same ribs to keep the pattern consistent.  Whenever I want a clean straight edge on something like a scarf, I always slip the first stitch according to the pattern either knitwise or purlwise and begin knitting with the next stitch.  This always makes a neat professional edge.  If you were to knit or purl the edge stitch according to the pattern, you end up with a row of bumps along the edge that clearly define it as a "homemade" instead of hand-knit.

This is a great pattern for someone who has knit and purl stitches down, has done a few knitting projects and is ready for a little more challenge.  You'll need at least four stitch holders and a row counter is crucial!  For the chain sections, you knit a series of ten stitches back and forth up to a certain number of rows and then twist them around each other before knitting across the entire row again.  This can be confusing at first but eventually starts to make sense.  The worst part of the pattern is the absurd number of ends that have to be woven in.  This scarf took me at least an hour and a half to weave in all of the ends before I was done.

I felt that the Rowan pattern's chain sequence was too close together so the next time I use this stitch pattern, I'll play around with the pattern to make the chain links longer.  I also would love to see how this looks using metallic yarns for the chains to make them stand out even more from the background.  The punk inspirations are endless!