Although I’ve never been much of a fan of natural-coloured yarns, I fell madly in love with this stuff at last year’s Bendigo show. Normally I buy Charly’s yarn for her genius ability to blend gorgeous colours together but for some reason I came home with the grey and the cream Bunny Mink and no clear idea of what to do with them.

Having exhausted my altruistic knitting spirit making Matt’s jumper, I thought it might be time to make a scarf for myself and went for a little play in the plastic tubs in the spare room. The Bunny Mink seemed to be speaking to me so out it came, and gradually I came up with the idea of a striped scarf. I’d seen the Poirot scarf when I first joined Ravelry: link text and I loved the idea of stripes heading off in two directions but hated the idea of all that sewing. Thankfully knitting legends Ann and Kay, the Mason-Dixon chicks, have taught me not to fear the picking up of squillions of stitches so I decided to use some log cabin skills to join my scarfy halves.

I started off knitting this in moss stitch but stopped after a while when I decided that I didn’t like the way the fabric was looking. Garter stitch felt like a bit of a cop-out, but given the fact that it was very thin yarn and very tiny needles, I probably saved what was left of my sanity by choosing a stitch I could churn out without having to concentrate (in other words, after the second glass of wine). I really liked the cream stripes through the grey and thought it all looked like a pinstriped suit, which prompted the name Penstripes (it was really funny after all the aforementioned Cab Sav).

I am a big fan of the Art Deco style and wondered if the scarf was looking a bit Deco and geometric as it grew, then dismissed that thought as pretentious arty-fartyness. How very gratifying that one of the members of my knitting group saw the finished Penstripes and said, ‘That looks like something a flapper would wear’. I will cherish that thought to comfort me through my next knitastrophe.

Speaking of knitastrophes, this one wasn’t and I’m really happy with the way that it turned out. It’s a fairly epic scarf, about 29 x 224cm, and my first attempt at using blocking wires. I decided to write up the stages of its development as a ‘pattern’ even though it’s not particularly difficult to reverse-engineer and it’s definitely not the first of its kind. Sometime it’s nice to have someone doing the heavy lifting for you, especially when life is busy. The details are here: link text

Typically I’ve finally finished Penstripes in time for summer, but it can go into the cupboard and we can wait for autumn together.