How to Please a Teenager, Part Two

Secondborn asked if we wanted to arrange this so it would be obvious that it was a long, skinny scarf, and not a panel of fabric with a slit running down the length of it. Very kind of her, considering her earlier attempts at bear-napping and extortion, but at that point I needed to take Fourthborn home from jury duty, grab a bite of dinner, and head over to Knit Night. So I regretfully declined.

After spending nearly a month on one pair of socks, this scarf was a treat to whip up! I cast on last Friday morning and knitted happily before work, on my breaks and at lunch.



This is a very long, very skinny scarf, begun at one corner and knitted diagonally with a 13-5-13, 8-5-8, 3-5-3, 8-5-8 Fibonacci pattern, where the bands of garter stitch are separated by a row of dropped stitches. It is 21 stitches wide at its widest.

On Saturday morning, I was nearly one-third done. I was also not happy with my YO increase pattern. It was wonderfully lacy in the corner section, but it made for a subtly arching straightaway, and not a parallelogram. So I frogged it.

I switched to a simple knit-on at the beginning of the row, as if it had magically appeared at the end of the previous row. Then I knit the new stitch and the one it grew out of and finished the row. I have no idea what to call this increase. M1+, perhaps? Because you actually wind up with three stitches worked in the host stitch, but a net increase of one. It's cumbersome to describe but rather slick to do.

This time I did not work the dropped stitch by wrapping each individual stitch twice while knitting and then dragging it, protesting, through the loop. This time I tried K1, YO, K1, YO, all the way across, ending K1, and on the next row those stitches dropped as smoothly as Mimi in "La Boheme".

LittleBit loves it. It's fluffy enough to please her, and the eyelash yarn holds the mohair away from her skin so there are no "tickle" issues, and the yarn bra kept "Melody" [the ladder yarn] humble and cooperative. I enjoyed knitting this much more than I thought I would.

I've already knitted up the last of it, all the eyelash yarn and most of the mohair, and I still have half a ball left of the "Melody". I'll post that on another day. It's a skinny circle of a scarf, also worked diagonally, this time from a provisional cast-on. I did the increases on scarf #2 with a generous YO [like my first attempt on this scarf] and now have eyelets. I want to take it into the marvelous ribbon shop we have on the other side of town and see if she has any French grosgrain to run through there, to make a seriously funky neck ruffle. I used a 3-needle bindoff, and I've yet to weave in the ends, so I don't want to show you yet.

But here's a close-up of the fabric on LittleBit's scarf:



The colors are a little skewed, but I was more interested in giving you a feel for the texture than anything else.

I started re-knitting bright and early on Saturday morning and blew through the first ball of eyelash yarn and a good way into the second. For reasons that escape me, I did not work on it once all day Sunday. On Monday before work, I added the second ball of mohair. At lunch I added the third and final ball of eyelash yarn. When I went to bed Monday night, the scarf was done, except for weaving in the ends. Yesterday morning, that was my first conscious act, and then I cast on 11 sts for the "use-it-up" scarf. Which was done by noon.