My first Ravelry project

I have used the ravelry website a few times, to look for inspiration for projects but I have never actually made something with a project on there, until now… This project isn’t complete yet, just over the halfway mark now actually, but I probably won’t post any photos of it on here until it is done, in case the recipient spots them on here.

My dance partner recently had his scarf ‘borrowed’ by his mother and was looking at getting a new one, but I thought this would be a great project for me to do, and something I can do a little of in the evenings to get some more regular crafting in.

I wanted something fairly chunky and soft so it would be quicker to knit up than thinner wool. I also have a habit of knitting quite tight, so I thought something bulky might be better. The colour scheme inspiration was blues, greys, black and whites.

So off I went to look for some inspiration on ravelry, and found this pattern for a Seafaring scarf, it uses Fisherman’s rib, which is a stitch I had never done. It knits into the row below the current one to make the knit more bulky and squishy (I am definitely a fan of squishy).

I swatched up a little in some marble chunky wool that was not being used, and I liked the pattern, fairly simple to do quickly and it has a nice bulk to it, but I thought the wool could do with being a bit more chunky.

It also took a little bit of fiddling around with the edge to get it looking neat, the fisherman’s rib pattern is a repeat of 2 stitches, and 1 extra stitch on the edge. I tried slipping the stitch knitwise, slipping purlwise, adding an extra stitch so I was always knitting the first stitch after the slip and probably a few other suggestions as well.

In the end I settled for slipping the first stitch of each row purlwise and then either knitting or purling into the next stitch depending on the direction. Each row was finished with just a normal knit stitch rather than k1b.

But I needed to sort the wool as well… We didn’t really have any wool lying around, at least not of the type I needed, and enough to knit a scarf. So after a walk up on Dartmoor Pippa and I popped into Hobbycraft to search out some wool. I wasn’t really blown away by their selection of chunky wools, they really didn’t have much available. But Pippa suggested I could knit two yarns together, this would also allow me to do a graduated colour change, only changing one yarn instead of both yarns together.

I settled on some Women’s institute soft and smooth yarn in Navy, Grey and Teal. Lovely looking colours and in large balls that will easily be enough for a few scarves, some hats and probably something else…These are normally meant to be knitted on 6mm needles, so I decided knitting two yarns together I would use 9mm needles which hopefully would help the tension not to be too tight.

I can definitely say from what I have knitted so far that it is super squishy! Definitely a winner in terms of the yarn. I already want to make one for myself and have had requests from Pippa and my mum to also knit them one… I think I might have to have a production line of these.

Luckily it seems to knit up fairly quickly so I shouldn’t be stuck on the project for too long, I know some people don’t like scarves because they find them boring, but I have spent two evenings on this and it is currently at about 30″ long. I think I’ve just passed the halfway mark, so well on my way to getting it done.

My only issue after that is getting all the ends woven in from the colour changes as it is quite a stretchy pattern… Well we’ll see about that when I finish knitting.