Thursday, January 14, 2010

Knitting "The Amazon" Multi-Green Scarf

Now, as I've said before, I have a rather short attention span when it comes to making objects of the knitted variety. I prefer to make scarves on my big needles--loose knit, skinny and measured from one knee to the other to know when to stop (or when I run out of yarn).  Because the yarns I use are generally expensive to begin with ($8 up to $30 a ball/skein), I try to make a scarf using one or two balls of yarn.

Once in a while, I combine the odd balls of yarn left over from other projects to make a "bohemian" style scarf such as this scarf in my shop.  Last week, a potential customer saw the Bohemian Greens and wrote to me asking if I could make a much wider, longer multi-greens scarf.  The exact request was to make a scarf like it that was 6" wide and 9-10 feet long.

So I got my supplies together.




I started out with a lovely variegated yarn, but after knitting a swatch with it, it was feeling like it was too complicated to mix with the others, so decided to leave that one out of it.

Then I put my yarns in an order I thought created a pleasing contrast of texture and color from one to the next, and made a sequence of the eight different yarns.

I had to decide how many rows of each color to do, based on how much of each yarn I thought I had.  It's always hard to guesstimate with a partially used ball of yarn, but ended up going in this ratio:



After working on the scarf for 5-6 nights, it was finally finished!  Hard to photograph a scarf that is 10+ feet long, but here are a couple of pics.  They are somewhat blurry because I think my camera's autofocus is having a hard time defining some of the fuzzy textures (and I'm no good with manual focus!).






I was going to name this one "Jolly Green Giant" for obvious reasons, but decided to go with the more subtle, but no less true, "The Amazon". 

Hope you enjoyed my story of making this warm, fluffy, humongous scarf.  Please write and tell me what width and length you prefer your scarves to be!  Thanks!!!

5 comments:

  1. That's amazing that you spend all that time creating the scarf. I'm not sure I would have the attention span for that! But I do appreciate it...one of my favorite gifts was a super long scarf from my friend. :)

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  2. Very fun! I always love to see how knitters use up balls of left over yarn. Your color combination is right one! The lose ends add nice texture and dimension. Great work!

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  3. I like it! What a great way to use what you've got to make a fabulous piece.

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  4. what a beautiful blend of greens! Sometimes using up remnants really help inspire a new project, don't the! fabulous!

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