The House Elf Liberation Front

My sister has a winter birthday. This year, she asked for a hat and scarf set for her birthday and Christmas. She wanted stripes, a tassel on the hat and fringe on the scarf, and for it to be red and purple to match her red coat.

I was able to make the hat and the scarf out of two skeins of black yarn and one each of the red and purple. There's a little black left unused (perhaps a fifth of the skein) and very little red or purple.

Striped Hat
Gauge: 4.75 spi
Needles: Bamboo dpns, US #6 (4mm)
Yarn: Cascade 220
Pattern: basic hat pattern from Ann Budd's The Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns, more or less.

The stripes at the brim were made by doing a longtail caston with two strands that put black on the bottom and purple on the needle, and then knitting a round of black, a round of red, and another round of black. I like the effect, but weaving in the ends neatly later was unpleasant. The tie for the tassel was made by braiding together one strand of each of the three colors.


( Hat Pics! )

Striped Scarf
Gauge: uncertain - didn't measure after blocking
Needles: Denise, US #9 (5.5mm)
Yarn: Cascade 220
Pattern: CO 60 sts, join round, knit until nearly out of yarn.

I used larger needles for the scarf than for the hat so that the scarf would be nice and limp. Because it's a tube, I wasn't worried about the individual layers being wind resistant. The end result is heavy, but she lives in Boston. A heavy, warm scarf isn't a bad thing.

Blocking is a lovely thing. When I realized I was nearly out of yarn, the scarf was about five and a half feet long, or possibly a little less. Hoping I wouldn't have to start new skeins of anything, I soaked the scarf in some tepid water, squeezed out as much as I could, and then laid it out on garbage bags to dry. I was able to stretch it quite a bit at first, and it grew a little longer each time I flipped it. When it was nearly dry, I took it off the floor and hung it over the shower rod to get a little more length out of it (and also to get it out of my only hallway.) End result after almost 48 hours of drying time: a seven foot long scarf, which is what my sister requested.

Closed tubes are lovely things too, when you're doing stripes. Rather than weave in a kazillion ends, I tied each pair of ends into a very secure knot, trimmed them down a little, and left them. This had the pleasant side effect of mostly fixing the jogs between the stripes as the last stitch of one stripe and the first stitch of the next were pulled tight together. It's visible in the photos, but it's not noticeable unless you're looking for it.

One thing I forgot to take photos of is the side "seams". There's a trick I read about in an Elizabeth Zimmerman book (possibly Knitter's Almanac) for stabilizing knit tubes by faking some seams on the sides. She had sweaters in mind, but it worked amazingly well here. Right at the end, knit until you reach the stitch you want to turn into a seam. Drop it aaaall the way down to the bottom. Then, with a crochet hook, start to pick it up. Instead of picking up each ladder to make a stitch as you would if you dropped the stitch accidentally, you pick up one ladder, then two ladders, then one, then two, and so on. What was three stitches becomes two. This makes a column of stitches that looks the same to the casual observer and that is ridged in a way that makes the fabric want to fold there. Voila! Scarf knit in the round that actually wants to lay flat rather than twisting.

( Scarf Pics! )