Flying Poodles

One good thing about the rainy dark season

Winters here in the Pacific Northwest can get rough. It starts getting dark around 4 and stays dark until 8 or 8:30. It rains or drizzles many days. Every year November finds me unprepared for it and I find myself counting the days until December 21st, when the number of light minutes starts to increase instead of decrease. (We have less than a month to go!)

But the dark and the weather does drive me to sit and knit, and projects that have been languishing for months get finished and new ones get started. A few days ago, I started two new scarves:

Elly and two scarves

This is a new pattern to me, although it’s quite popular. I am using size 8 needles with DK-weight yarn, two different colors silk-merino blends (from the old company Dyed in the Wool, bought using EBay), and 29 stitches. Two rows in each color of 1×1 rib (knit one, purl one, all the way across), with the first stitch of each row slipped.

The cool thing about the 1×1 rib is that it scrunches up pretty densely, the scarf hangs nicely with no “wrong side,” and it looks cool with hand-dyed yarn.

This is the blue scarf finished (I ran out of the lighter blue, so time to stop).

Blues in silk and merino

(And yes, that’s a handknitted blanket that Elly is resting on. It’s also from the same silk-merino blend I made the scarves from, in yet another shade of blues. Garter stitch, and lots and lots of yarn. Two winters ago.)