This scarf has been such a saga!

I made a plain, dark grey scarf for Matt last year and tried to talk him into a beanie this year only to hear, “Scarves are always handy”. Yes, I thought, but hats are really quick to knit.

At least I could do something colourful, though, something for the weekend to balance the grey, corporate Monday to Friday scarf. A weekend scarf, and that’s what this project was called until it all went horribly wrong.

I wanted something fun, something relaxed, and something that felt luxurious, so that it would be a nice companion for Matt whether his weekend highlight consisted of a fabulous brunch or losing the will to live in the supermarket checkout queue.

The Nundle wool is gorgeously squooshy and the colours are beautiful, so that was a good start. Then I became obsessed with linen stitch. I found the Cerus scarf in the pattern library link text
and loved the way that the Mini Mania scarf link text used new colours every two rows. And Purlpower made one for a bloke that looked quite manly: link text

Right then, off we go. I noted in the Cerus pattern that I needed to go up a needle size because linen stitch creates a very dense fabric, so I skipped over the trusty 4mm circulars and went for the 5mm option. I contemplated doing a swatch but then thought, get over yourself, it’s a scarf.

So I squared my shoulders and cast on 395 stitches. That was the second go - the first time I cast on 300 stitches and ran out of wool on the tail, so I had to start again. I was aiming for 400 stitches, got to 395 and decided that I wasn’t casting on again. Enough is enough.

So I knitted about 5 very long rows in linen stitch and had a bad moment. The fabric wasn’t just dense, it was completely rigid. The Nundle 8ply was so thick and squishy that it was behaving more like 10 or 12 ply wool and the needles just weren’t big enough.

I tried to rationalise it and pretend it would be fine, but eventually I had to face the truth. This was a scarf and scarves should bend. God knows, the recipients of my knitting projects have learned to lower their standards but even I couldn’t give Matt a knitted surfboard in place of weekend neckwear.

So I took a very deep breath and ripped out nearly 2000 stitches. I reminded myself that Matt is a very dear friend. It didn’t help. I ate some chocolate, which helped a bit. And then I cast on again, 400 stitches, but on 6mm needles.

Then, after many thousands more stitches, I had another crisis. I loved the textile I was producing but I just couldn’t see it as a scarf for a bloke. The colours had seemed so harmonious as innocent balls of wool and now they were hurting like a hangover. As my high school art teacher would have said, there was a lot going on there.

I workshopped it with long-suffering itsagift and my calm Norwegian knitting friend Sigrid.

I made an emergency visit to Haigh’s, in case the inevitable happened.

I walked around the scarf on the sofa for 48 hours, fending off the inevitable.

Then I sat down and ripped it all back again.

Matt is a really good person, who is generous and funny and very patient. But I wish he liked hats more.

So the Weekend Scarf 2.0 is knitted sideways in garter stitch and it acquired its new name because that’s what I called it on my many whingy phone calls to Itsagift. I ended up with 400 stitches in a row and did 6 garter ridges for each stripe, and complained in every row. The finished scarf is about 240cm by 26cm, so it’s epic.

It just looks so much more like Matt and it also bends so much more, like a scarf. Matt received his scarf at his birthday party and put it straight on for photos even though it was a hot November Sydney day. He called it a Dr Who scarf, which is an honour indeed.

I’m still planning a linen stitch scarf, one day. And I will do a swatch first, no matter how silly it seems.