What I Have Been Knitting

Hello blogging friends! You know, I blinked and it was November! Well, I didn’t really blink because I did enjoy all of the glorious colored leaves that Mother Nature gave this year. The colors were so bright and vivid this year. As I look out my craft room window, most of the trees are now bare and looking very winter like. The sun is shining and it is a wonderful 63 degrees out, so I am not even thinking about winter being just around the corner.

So, what has been on my needles, you ask? Well, back in September when my Mother-in-law was visiting, we took a trip to a yarn shop and found some beautiful Noro yarns. Now I have never knit with Noro before, and I can honestly say that several years ago when seeing some of the Noro dinosaur eggs, I couldn’t figure out what all the hype was about them. The yarn seemed to look rough

and didn’t feel the softest to the touch. I didn’t want to knit with it. I have since learned that the yarns do soften up as you knit with them and the colors are quite beautiful. So, I decided to take the leap and try my first Noro yarn.

The yarn is Noro’s Tsubame. This is a 200 gram skein, ball, or egg, whatever you want to call it. There are 656 yards, so a lot of yarn here. The pattern I decided to use is the Eyelet Scarf which was featured in a Noro magazine, but is also available on Ravelry.

A very easy pattern that is easily remembered after a few pattern repeats.

The color changes are quite beautiful and really flow nicely into the next. The yarn does soften up as I knit with it. This yarn is 50% silk, 25% wool and 25% nylon. So the silk really does make this knit up really nice.

I knitted this scarf according to the pattern, creating 38 repeats and then adding the seed stitch to the bottom and then bound off the stitches.

The finished length was supposed to be 67″, but when I finished, it was only 42″ and I didn’t think I would get the correct length when blocking, without distorting the eyelets. I undid the bind off and ripped back to the eyelet pattern and continued with the pattern until I was close to finishing the skein, doing 52 repeats and then adding the seed stitch section and then binding off.

I was able to block it out to 73″ which is a much better length. This way I can fold the scarf in half and push the ends through the loop and have a good amount of the ends hang down. If I were to make this scarf again, I would definitely only cast on 37 stitches instead of 57. It is quite wide at 13″. I would prefer a narrow scarf. But it turned out nice and is nice and soft and hangs nicely.

So that is one of the knit projects that I have finished lately. What have you been creating?

Happy Stitching!

Ginny