In Which the Pirate Makes a Scarf.

Before last week’s vacation, I decided that I wanted to make a new scarf on the machine (since there was no way I was going to get new mittens finished in time) using Loops & Threads “Woolike” yarn from Michaels that I bought as practice yarn for the machine. It’s a light fingering weight, mostly acrylic yarn with a soft feel to it, and it’s quite inexpensive – $2.99 for 678 yards, but with the ubiquitous 40% off coupons, it comes out to $1.80 a ball.

First, I spent some time using Excel as graph paper (tedious, but sometimes I have a lot of down time at work) charting out the design for the border and main body of the scarf. This is what I came up with, though it got tweaked a little before I started – partly to adjust the stitch count for the width of scarf I wanted, and partly because it’s more convenient to have even numbers of solid-coloured rows to avoid breaking the contrast colour yarn.

Then, I had to figure out how to get this chart into Designaknit, which isn’t exactly the most intuitive or user-friendly program. With that accomplished, I then figured out how to load the pattern into the machine, and began to knit.

It wasn’t long before things went sideways. I didn’t quite get the contrast yarn into the carriage properly, and dropped a whole bunch of stitches as a result. After some time trying to rescue the piece, I decided that it would be easier to just start over… so I did.

The second attempt went a lot better. Not that I didn’t make mistakes! The major one was that I forgot to keep an eye on my yarn supply as it fed up through the mast, and at one point a big chunk of yarn barf got hung up in the tensioner and I produced one super-tight row. I successfully unraveled it and then didn’t get the machine set properly, so my next row was the wrong one in the pattern… which I didn’t realize for another ten rows.

It takes 2.5 minutes to knit a 28 row pattern repeat across 150 needles. It takes an hour to unravel ten rows of colourwork.

Anyway, that was the worst of it, and I made the rest of the scarf with little further problem. I brought it on vacation with me, optimistically thinking that the seaming wouldn’t take the whole week… but it did, and I sewed the last bit of it up on the morning that we left for home. For the seaming, I used a small crochet hook to line up the motifs on each side, and then made an attempt at doing mattress stitch.

As a test piece goes, I’m quite happy with this scarf. I’ve worn it twice now, and it’s incredibly squishy, soft, and comfortable – and warm! I have no idea how well the yarn will wear or how quickly it will get fuzzy and pulled, but since it took a few evenings to make and under $6 in cost, I don’t mind if it does. My seaming skills could certainly use some improvement, and I already know how I would change the design and making-up for the next time… because there will definitely be a next time!