Harry Potter and the Scarf of Doom

I knit a few more rows of the horrible Harry Potter scarf. I hate that scarf. It is the very bane of my existence. I still have 2 balls of red yarn to go. It's very long. It has to be, because it's very wide. I don't know if I'll ever finish it.

It's become famous. The kids make comments all the time about it.

"Are you ever going to finish that?"

Eventually. That or I'll donate it to poor bungee jumpers. It's nearly long enough now.

Queen of Hearts

I've knit lace once before. There are lace panels in the cable scarf. They're nothing fantastic, but they are still lace. I've been having trouble with more elaborate lace lately, though. I just can't get it right. My yarn overs never look as big as the pictures in the patterns.

I did find a cute heart pattern, part of an old Knitty special edition. I'm having some luck with it. It might become a scarf.


It's a pretty simple pattern. Aside form the k4tog (knit 4 stitches together all at once!). You just have to split it in the middle if you want all of your hearts to go the right way. That's easy.


One of the things about lace knitting is that it doesn't look like much until you block it. I wasn't really sure about it until I had blocked it. I'm on my way to Lowe's to look for wire instead of paying through the nose for lace blocking wires. We'll see how that goes.

The Infamous Harry Potter Scarf

I started knitting the Harry Potter scarf in the fall of 2006. I think. I really don't recall exactly when the nightmare began. It started out innocently enough. I was going to make Amber the scarf from the third HP movie. It's a pretty big scarf. Not only that, it's knit in the round so it's twice as many stitches. It's also the same stitch, the knit stitch, every stitch. 44 rows of KnitPicks Merino Style "hollyberry"... then 4 rows of "goldenrod"...another 8 hollyberry...4 more goldenrod...and then you start over. And over. And over. I'm estimating that there are well over 4500 stitches in this scarf so far and it's still not done.


As I said before, the scarf is knit in the round so it's knit on every row. I have actually become adept at knitting Continental style (yarn in the left hand) because it's so incredibly boring that if you don't do something different, you want to bang your head against the wall. You pray for the goldenrod rows to come up so that you at least have a different color to look at. It's horrible. It is the scarf of doom.



Now, at one point during the HP Scarf, I started knitting a cable and lace scarf in 100% alpaca. It's gorgeous. When I showed the lovely Victoria the pattern, she asked if I was on crack. It's a 32 row repeat. For those of you who aren't concerned by that...it means that there are 32 different rows. Those 32 rows in this yarn yield about 5 inches of scarf, so I did that about 12 times. There are two 8-stitch cables and a 4-stitch with lace panels in between and a 2 stitch selvage. I actually had to think about this one! It was great, and really not all that hard once I got going. I learned really great ways to fix mistakes, too. It was nice. There are only two noticeable mistakes on this scarf. Of course, if I'd stop pointing them out to people they probably wouldn't be as noticeable.