Over the weekend I made a very simple scarf. The results are so fun I had to share it with you. The pattern is Waterfall, by Linda O’Leary. It’s in 101 Designer One-Skein Wonders. It is a great resource to help you use up your stock of single skeins. Because of my short attention span, I have a lot of those hanging around the studio.
The yarn I used was a loosely spun single from Sweet Georgia Yarns fibre club. The colour way is Vintage Postcards and the fibre is Falklands. I’ve been wondering what to do with this yarn for a while, and when I saw the Waterfall pattern, I knew it had a chance. The colours in the yarn would cause horizontal striping and the dropped stitches would cause vertical striping. Could be a nice result.
The knitting was simple, straight garter stitch knitted in the back loop. It’s a minor variation but you get used to it quickly. The magic comes after the bind-off. You leave a few live stitches on and then let them run down the length of the scarf – as controlled drop stitches. The twisted stitches on either side of the dropped stitch keep the stitches tight so the dropped stitch doesn’t make the others around it loose.
Because the yarn is a loosely spun single, the fibres often caught. So it wasn’t a simple dropped stitch that ran down the scarf like wildfire. It was a bit of a tug-o-war and I had to snip fibres occasionally to get it to drop. Once dropped, the yarn released from the stitch makes a wide space, about three stitches wide. So the narrow scarf widens.
Still working on the last column of dropped stitches. But it’s a good result, no?