Oh, the saga of this scarf…

A while back, I knit a Prismatic scarf as a gift for a friend who couldn’t wear it because of the yarn. She’s allergic to wool, and to add insult to injury, the yarn also had some scratchy mohair in it. So I went back to my LYS and, on their advice, bought a skein of 100% alpaca yarn. I even had my friend rub it against her skin before I wound it in case I needed to take it back.

The yarn I picked up was a skein of Judith, now discontinued, in the Renata Tebaldi colorway, which is a lovely mix of pinks and browns. And then I wasn’t sure what to do with it; I was already in the middle of my third Prismatic and Judith seemed a little thin for that pattern anyway. Plus, I got sidetracked with other projects.

Finally, over a year later, I decided it was time to find a pattern and make the new scarf, and I settled on Cilantro. I bought the pattern (well worth the price!), and then discovered that I had lost the skein of yarn. It’s in the house somewhere, but after a week of dismally searching and re-searching all the places it could be, I got so frustrated that I decided to see if I could track down another skein. Since the yarn was discontinued, there wasn’t much to choose from online, but I scored a skein of the Margo Jones colorway, which was right in between the lost Judith and the yarn for the original scratchy scarf.

Everything from that point on was smooth sailing. Cilantro is really fun to knit, and after one pattern repeat I had learned the pattern. Once you get into it, the lace is very easy to follow as you knit. The sawtooth edge is especially neat. Two teeth in, I switched from the standard bind off to a p2tog bind off and found that easier to manage. (At the end, I bound off by k2tog tbl.) My scarf, which is somewhere between the fingering and worsted versions, did end up a little on the small side, only 42” on the long sawtooth edge, but it’s still big enough to wrap comfortably around your neck.

This was my first opportunity to use my lace blocking wires, and I’m very happy to have them in my tool kit.

I’m knitting a beaded Muir shawl now, and I’m quite tempted to try another Cilantro with beads between the columns of yarn overs. I do have some lovely Ella Rae lace in my stash…