A FO!

I’ve been holding out on you. I finished the Piecrust Basketweave scarf sometime in mid-March; I’ve been keeping the FO post back, knowing that there would come a time when all I had by way of new knitting is longer WIPs. Both my chevron scarf and Aran Pocket shawl are significantly longer than in their last viewing, but both being rectangles, longer is just, um, longer. And I think the tiki mug stole my sock knitting mojo as the sock remains the same. So let’s look at my finished scarf!

Six feet of fuschia, alpaca-y goodness.

Picot sevedges on ends (looks like the fluting on a piecrust, but don’t tell anyone, they’ll think I’m dorky).

Piecrust Basketweave stitch pattern from Vogue Knitting Stitchionary: Vol 1, pattern #33.

Yarn: Plymouth Yarns Chunky Baby Alpaca in a hot pink, fuschia.

This is the third time I’ve knit something out of a “chunky” alpaca, and I think it may be the last. I think alpaca is better in the finer weights. It lacks the sproinginess necessary to take the weight of the chunky yarn without stretching too much. Based on my swatch, the scarf should be five feet long but is really six feet long. Because I cast on the length, knitting to the width (looked better with the horizontal nature of the pattern), the stretch runs the length. The longer the scarf got, the more it stretched and didn’t bounce back. I blocked it as I had done before, using wires and blocking it dry followed by spritzing it with water until it was pretty wet, which was what the yarn manufacturer recommended for the other scarf. I think if I had soaked the whole scarf, the weight of the water would have over-stretched the yarn perhaps to breaking point.

I like the stitch pattern (complete sucker for knit-purl stitch patterns!); it was very easy. I modified the edges which had a lot of reverse stockinette tacked on. In an attempt to make it look more finished, I did a 2-stitch picot at the start of each row, and it ended up looking like piecrust fluting, but I like it, and as the scarf doesn’t have a big sign that says it was named “piecrust basketweave” by the Vogue Knitting editors, I don’t think it’s really an issue. All in all, I’m looking forward to wearing the scarf in another 7-8 months when the weather here will turn cool. I clearly don’t live in the ideal location for handknits in natural animal fibers!

This is a long post so I’ll save the good smelling stuff I got in the mail today for a post later this week, as I suspect that my WIPs will still be merely longer.