Puzzle Scarf

Three days and three days with bad news. My boss found out this morning that a friend of his passed away last night. My mom always said things happen in threes. I am hoping that's true and this is the end of it for a long time.

On the knitting front, here are pictures and more information about the scarf I made for my partner for the International Scarf Exchange 5. Since I have no idea if this pattern has a proper name or not, I am going to call it the Puzzle Scarf. The scarf is from the Japanese knitting book called Let's Knit Series 3. The ISBN number is 4529042758. I bought my copy from The Needle Arts Book Shop. I am not affiliated with this website in any way. I am just a very satisfied customer. I got a lot of help working on the mechanics of this scarf from the KnittingInJapan Yahoo group. I don't think I could have done the scarf without them (but then I have said that before).

Yarn is Schoeller Esslinger Merino Soft, in case you missed it. Scarf started on October 13, 2007 and finished October 21, 2007. I used 3.5mm needles and 3.25mm crochet hook for the crocheted edging.




The scarf is worked IN ONE PIECE from beginning to end. I have never seen anything constructed this way. It's pure genius if you ask me. I did change a few things when I did the last section and edging. The edging is a crochet edging where you chain 7, single crochet in the next stitch, skip the next stitch, chain 7 etc. I did two rounds of the edging instead of 1, doing the single crochets in the stitch that was skipped the first time around. Also instead of keeping the entire scarf stitches live after finishing chart D I chose to cast off each D section and single crochet around to the next section where you would pick up the stitches to work another D section. For me, this was much easier than working it with all the stitches live. I would have gone nuts and this way I was able to do the double row of edging.

I must admit, I am very pleased with the final result. I am still a little nervous about my partner. I hope she is going to like it. I was going to use an alpaca yarn in a black with red tweed but I decided against it because if the yarn was a dark colour the pattern would have been lost.

Now I need some ideas on what to send along with the scarf so I can get this out in the mail this weekend.

Next up, I am working on a sock design but I can't really go into that right now other than it's toe up.