The 2012 sky scarf

For day 8 of #blog12daysxmas and the first day of 2013

I finished my sky scarf on the very last day of 2012, a beautiful sunny day with clear, cloudless, bright blue skies so I got to finish with my favourite blue yarn.

The scarf is now a record of the Melbourne sky from 1 January through to 31 December 2012. It really wasn’t the best of years but it’s somehow comforting to be able to count back through the scarf to see what the sky was like the day my dad died, or for the two weeks when our little dog Willy was in hospital, or the days in September when Wayne was in hospital having surgery.

I spent the last day of the year knitting the final blue stripe before casting off and weaving in all the loose ends, a nice way to look at finishing up the old year really.

I read somewhere that a man’s scarf should be as long as you are tall. I’m about 175 cm and this scarf comes in at 230 cm so I should have stopped knitting sometime in October! It will be beautifully warm though, when the chilly weather returns.

If you’d like to do something like this for 2013, all the details are on my Ravelry page.

My scarf was knit in Rowan Felted Tweed DK held double on 5.5 cm needles.

I knit my scarf in simple garter stitch, casting on 34 stitches for a scarf 20 cm wide, and knitting one row and back every day. By knitting with the yarn held double, and by splitting each skein in half, you can choose to knit each day’s stripe in two strands of the same colour or combine two different shades.

I carried all the yarn up the side, wrapping at each right side row, and it really looks pretty neat. Snipping and starting with new yarn every time you change colour really doesn’t bear thinking about. I think at the end I had about eight yarn ends to weave in.

I used two skeins of bright blue Maritime, two of paler Duck Egg, two of pale blue-grey Scree, one of palest grey Clay and a little dark grey Dragon that I had left over from another project. If I’d thought of it, some hazy purple-grey Horizon would have been lovely too. Each skein of Felted Tweed has 175 m and I ended up using almost all of it, this is all I had left over…

If you do decide to knit yourself a sky scarf in 2013 let me know, and good luck!

The Social Network Scarf

a scarf idea for blogjune day 16

I’ve been working on my sky scarf since New Year’s day and I’m going to keep going until the end of the year, adding a row each day to record the colours of the Melbourne sky. Here’s another neat idea, the social knitwork scarf! It’s the second in a series of conceptual knitting projects by Lea Redmond.

“Most knitting patterns call for yarn, needles, and familiarity with abbreviations such as CO, K2tog, and St st. Typical patterns might even ask you to keep track of alternating colors on a grid. The Conceptual Knitting patterns you’ll find here are creatures of an entirely different sort.” ~ Lea Redmond

In the social knitwork scarf you use your network of friends from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or your blog and ask them to pick a colour and tell you why. Then you knit those colours into your scarf in the order you get tweets or comments. Lea suggests using four colours, but it’s really up to you. Think of the fun you can have!

Sky scarf update

This is my sky scarf from New Year’s Day right up to my birthday a few days ago.

There’s been quite a lot of blue, it was certainly a perfect blue autumn sky the day I took this photo, but we’ve also had some overcast days recently.

Luckily my skein of a new colour “Clay” arrived just in time, white with flecks of grey and blue.

2012 sky scarf

almond blossom against a Melbourne spring sky

I’d heard of project knitters, people who are more focused on the outcome, versus process knitters, people who are more focused on the practice of knitting, but how about conceptual knitters? Lea Redmond has started a conceptual knitting project, something that goes beyond knitting a garment or an accessory…

Most knitting patterns call for yarn, needles, and familiarity with abbreviations such as CO, K2tog, and St st. Typical patterns might even ask you to keep track of alternating colors on a grid. The Conceptual Knitting patterns you’ll find here are creatures of an entirely different sort.

Yes, you’ll need yarn, needles and basic knitting skills. But most importantly, you’ll need a sense of whimsy and adventure. These surprising patterns will inspire you to look out your window, ride the subway and converse with your next-door neighbor. They will have you re-reading your favorite book and feeding a pocketful of coins into the gumball machine in front of your supermarket. In order to knit these unique one-of-a-kind garments, you’ll be sent out into the world – and deep within your heart – turning something as simple as a scarf into an unexpectedly storied object.

The first project invites you to knit the weather in your part of the world over the course of a year by creating a sky scarf.

A “sky scarf” documents the weather out your window. Each day, you will knit a stripe in colors that match the sky. It will be lovely to see how different climates create different scarves! This pattern makes a 5-foot scarf over the course of one year.

At the end of the year you’ll have a beautiful scarf, but you’ll also have a record of what the sky looked like through the year in your part of the world, and you can share with other people through the Flickr and Ravelry groups.

Christmas day sky at my brother's house

Some people have decided to use the idea to knit a record of other things, like a person on Ravelry who has decided to track the colours of the maple tree out front of her house, but I’m going to knit a year of the Melbourne sky.

Rowan Felted Tweed "Maritime"

I have a couple of skeins of Rowan Felted Tweed in “Dragon” grey and “Maritime” blue and I’ve ordered another paler blue  and a pale grey. By using a relatively thin yarn you can double the strands to make lots of colour variations, like blue with pale grey for blue sky with clouds.

Anyone want to join in?

Details at the Conceptual Knitting page.