Falling Leaves Scarf

The lace knitting is a fairly easy, but the finishing is somewhat fiddly. I think that the edging could also had been improved.

This pattern and yarn was selected by Grumperina as part of the Stitch Ya Neck Out knit-along.
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Vogue Knitting Spring 2005
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Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino
200g
none
4.5 mm
140 wc
Grumperina
Baby Blue
approx 60 inches long
23 Aug 2004
11 Sep 2005
none
Grumperina







This is a lovely pattern, easy to knit, easy to memorise and very effective. The debbie bliss baby cashmerino is a divine yarn and one of my favourited, not too thin, not too thick and very elastic.

The only fiddly part is the grafting. You have to graft with purl and knit stitches up, which will make this pretty challenging for someone who hasn't done a lot of grafting before, especially as the pattern doesn't describe how to graft it and you will rarely find instructions to graft with pur stitches. (but if you've ever done grafting before, you'll know how because you would had done this accidentally before.

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Although the yarn is lovely, I would think that this pattern would work better with a less elastic yarn. I gave it a hard block to get the scallop-y edges some definition but when I unpinned it, it was gone.

Project Notes

Things that I like about this project:

1. Interesting pattern to work. The reason that I hate knitting scarves is that you just knit the same pattern over and over again. This scarf had interesting patterning so it work well.

2. Debbie Bliss baby cashmerino is one of my favourite yarns

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3. You only need 2 and a half balls of the baby cashmerino to work the scarf.

4. I found working it simultaneously to give me the lease amount of headache to match up the length

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Things that I didn't like:

1. Grafting the two pieces together. It's tricky and a bit fiddly because you have to graft knit side and purl side up and there were no instructions in the pattern to do it. I have done this before so it wasn't that bad, but I can imagine someoone doing this that hasn't done it before.. with 47 stitches... ouch!

2. I'm not entirely happy with the slanting of the pattern. OK, about blind man and galloping horse, but on a light colour yarn, I don't like it.

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Close-up (and personal)


3. This yarn isn't great for this pattern. I think something drapier like linen or silk would work better. Baby casmerino is too elastic and resisted the blocking a bit. So the edges still rolled slightly even after a hard wet blocking. If I was doing this pattern again, I would almost certainly do a few rolls of garter stitches at the edges.

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4. I would have also added a few rows of garter before starting the lace.

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