At last some knitting content

For various reasons last week was very busy which means no time to blog. I did have time to do some knitting here and there and I do have a finished item to show you!

When I first started this blog my eldest brother made a casual comment about wanting a handknit scarf. Since I like knitting for people who actually want to be knit for I decided this was a good idea. Some back and forth via email and a cabled, tweedy scarf was the brief. My family has some Irish heritage way back when so cables seemed like a nice link.

So the search was on for the perfect pattern. I trawled the internet, devoured the Ravelry pattern database, scoured my stitch dictionary but to no avail. Nothing was quite perfect. Or at least the things that appealed were really complicated and I am at best an advanced beginner with cables. And then I came across a saxon braid cable, even better I came across the incredibly well written, "design a cable" tutorial using the saxon braid motif on Eunny Jang's old blog (link in a post somewhere below - it really is excellent). I loved it, and more importantly understood it enough to make it knittable but I would still learn something.

Then the search for the yarn began...and ended in a drawer in the spare room where I had a large skein of New Lanark DK tweed in a lovely dark blue. That bit was easy

And so to the knitting...

As I was using Eunny Jang's saxon braid chart I won't be writing this up as a pattern but I'll tell you what I did. I cast on 34 stitches on 4.5mm needles and worked 10 rows of moss stitch. On the next row I worked 7 stitches in moss stitch, placed a marker, then knit the first row of the chart, placed a second marker, realised I should have cast on 35 stitches, decided it added to the artisan nature of the piece (sorry John) and then worked the last 6 stitches in moss stitch. I carried on like this to the end of the saxon braid chart and the continued into a wide rib for 20 rows, then a braid, the 20 rows and so on until I'd worked 8 braid+rib sections and then worked a final braid, repeated the 8 rows of moss stitch and then cast off. A slow block later I had a lovely scarf fit for an international man of mystery like my brother.

And here it is...

John's scarf

This is a birthday present but I've already sent him the link to my Ravelry project page so it's not a secret.