It’s a bird. It’s a plane?

15 August, 2008 at 9:21 am (FO, knitting)

It’s… a neckwarmer!

Most of you were spot-on, although I happen to know that several of you totally cheated by noticing that I mentioned it on my Plurk page. But that was mostly my own fault, since I’d forgotten that I had done the mentioning. Oh well. By virtue of being correct and getting lucky with the random number generator, illiane snags the prize, which is a secret, so I’m not saying any more until she gets it.

Pattern: my own (see below)
Yarn: Queensland Collection Kathmandu DK in colour #403, less than half a skein
Needles: US8/5mm
Notes: I had an overwhelming urge to knit a herringbone neckwarmer for three reasons: one, instant gratification! two, neckwarmers=an awesome way to show off really neat buttons, and three, in case you haven’t noticed, I really love herringbone. 3a, neckwarmers in August are a really excellent idea. No really. Stop looking at me like that.

So I cast on 28 stitches (the stitch pattern technically calls for a multiple of 4+2 but I wasn’t really paying much attention and it doesn’t matter too terribly much) and worked in transverse herringbone (which is from one of the Barbara Walker dictionaries, but can also be found here) for about 14″. The stitch pattern is extremely dense, with slipped stitches on every row, which is why I used such a large needle size for the yarn—otherwise I would have a bulletproof neckwarmer, which, while probably wind-resistant, would be a bit much for New Jersey weather. After I bound off I realized that not only were the edges horrendous looking, I’d also forgotten to include buttonholes, which are kind of useful sometimes. So I solved both problems at once by doing one row of single crochet around the whole thing, throwing in two ch 2 button loops on one end.

The buttons themselves were snagged from the Traveling Button Box Swap from the Button Addicts group on Ravelry. I placed them in about a half an inch from the edge, which leaves enough of an overlap so that none of my neck is exposed, but also enough ease (about 1.5″) so that I won’t appear on the news for being strangled to death by my own neckwarmer.

There’s a Rav page for this project here, which doesn’t really have any further information, but does have a handy favouriting button, just in case you feel so inclined.