Autumn and a scarf called Hope

Autumn arrived today. I feel like I can always identify the beginning of the change of season because of a change in the way air smells – even though I know that doesn’t really make any sense. The air is cool and today when I came home, just all of a sudden, the grass in front of my apartment was carpeted by the shed dry needles of the large evergreen standing there. Leaves have been changing color for a while now, and the colors of the mountained horizon have been changing as well. The sun has been going down earlier and nights are much crisper. (So I’ll be dressing warmly tonight on the observatory deck!)

I love fall more than any other season and it always makes me feel a little ache. The smell and colors and cool air bring me back to so many different places. I remember being in preschool and my game of trying to catch the falling leaves all recess as they fell through the air. I’ve been in school for most of my life and associate fall with new beginnings. It’s always a new school year, often a new place, a chance to do better, to grow, and to be surprised by new things. A new nostalgia makes me remember being a Starbucks barista in autumn, the return of pumpkin flavored everything, the heat and smell of steamed drinks, and the renewed influx of customers (usually returning college students) looking for warmth and comfort.

I love orange and brown and yellow and red.

Autumn also makes me feel that my knitting is once again useful and inspires me to all new kinds of projects. Currently, I am knitting a scarf for a new friend of mine, a fellow graduate student. (He said he thought that scarves were pretentious! If you say the wrong thing to me, you get a scarf. That’s how it works.) But I dream of legwarmers, gloves and mittens, lace and felt, alpaca and wool, and needles of all shapes and sizes.

The last major knitting project I undertook was a couple of years ago, when I lived in Rhode Island and knitting was much more useful than in South Carolina. I knitted a series of 11 scarves, all meant to represent the person who was going to receive them. Alas a major life upheaval brought by that particular fall meant that I never delivered most of these scarves to their inspirees (who never knew I was making them anyway). And as a result, I still have many of them to show off.

This scarf from that project is particularly fall appropriate:

a scarf called Hope

I wish I had kept notes on all of these scarves, but alas I did not. While I can’t be totally sure, I’m about 90% certain that I used Madelinetosh DK weight yarn in the color “Moss.” What I loved about this yarn was its beautiful and subtle hand painting and variegation. It’s also super-duper soft and warm, made of 100% superwash merino wool.

I wanted to knit it into an interesting texture without detracting from the beauty of the yarn itself, and because I had so many scarves to knit, needed something uncomplicated that would knit up easily into a good width and length and would be reversible and maintain a roughly flat shape.

I decided to knit it up in a pattern similar to a 4×4 stitch rib, but with the ribs shifted horizontally by one stitch with each row so that instead of getting vertical ribs, I’d get diagonal ones. This keeps the full 26 stitch width of the scarf. (I always slip my first stitch, hence why it’s not a 28 stitch width.)

For the curious, here is the pattern. It is simple in the extreme, and therefore a nice scarf to knit when doing other things. I’m calling it “Hope” after the person who inspired it.

HOPE

This scarf is 28 stitches across, I’m guessing I knit it on size 10 needles. ** With 225 yards/skein and size 10 needles, I was able to make a good sized scarf with just one hank.

The basic pattern is
Row 1: k3, (p4,k4)*3, p1
Row 2: k2, (p4,k4)*3, p2
Row 3: k1, (p4,k4)*3, p3
Row 4: (p4,k4)*3, p4
Row 5: p1, (k4,p4)*3, k3
Row 6: p2, (k4,p4)*3, k2
Row 7: p3, (k4,p4)*3, k1
Row 8: (k4,p4)*3, k4

Repeat the above sequence of rows until the desired length is achieved. (Personally, I think scarves should always be at least 5 ft. in length.)

**The suggested needle size for this yarn is size 6-7, but in addition to trying to get away with the largest possible needles on all of these scarves to make them knit up more quickly, I also find that it’s nice to use slightly bigger needles than suggested for scarves to make them more soft and flexible. I don’t think it hurts the warmth of the scarf at all. In fact, I think the increased air-pocket size in addition to the increased width and length from knitting on slightly larger needles probably adds to it’s functional warmth.

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