The original pattern called for Blue Sky’s worsted. I instead chose the more economical Berroco Flicker yarn in 3305 (a k a “Siegfried,” a very light grey with silver flecks). This colorway is discontinued, but my LYS had plenty of it in stock. It sparkles like freshly fallen snow — very pretty!

This is a lighter weight yarn than the pattern specified. Using US17 needles, per the pattern, I find I am getting about 3” of fabric per skein of Flicker, knitting to the 58” diameter the pattern calls for. (I had to adjust the number of cast-on stitches in order to achieve this diameter, although I no longer remember by how much. The pattern calls for 220 cast-on stitches, and I believe I did 280 or even 290.)

The resulting fabric isn’t quite as thick, of course, as it would be with the Blue Sky. I do love the bulkiness of this piece as shown on Purl Soho’s website, so I will likely use all 5 skeins, which will make it 15” (one extra inch to the width) which should help slightly offset the lack of bulk in the fabric. At about 13” currently, it’s a nice, voluminous scarf already.

I love the “wrong” side of this stitch as well, as shown in the second photo.

03.31.14 I thought for sure I would finish knitting this over the weekend, but I still had the bind-off to do, and did that today. It took a while to settle on a bind-off method. I had read a comment on the Purl Bee website that the pattern’s bind-off (which is just a regular bind-off in pattern) made for a slightly tighter edge than desired.

So I experimented with some extra stretchy bind-offs (JSSBO, for one). They all looked like crap, though, when done in pattern. This pattern has such strange long loops, and when you add extra yarn, it just looks bulky and odd.

In the end I did it exactly according to the pattern and am quite happy with the result. I will say, I kept my stitches along the bind-off somewhat loose, and I think that helped.

04.01.14 weaved in loose ends — of which there were just three (at the beginning and the end, and then one dropped stitch needed fixing) because I used the felting (or “spit splicing”) method to connect my skeins. Love that!

One note about felting/spit splicing joins: you do get a change in texture where you do this, the yarn is much stiffer and thicker. So if your piece requires absolute uniformity, I would do another type of join. At the very least, I would separate out and thin the plies and then spiral them together to create a uniform thickness before spit splicing/felting them. I could not do this with the Flicker yarn, however, because it is a chainette, not a plied yarn.

That it is a chainette may have contributed to this issue. Chainette results in a very light and lofty yarn, with a lot of air in the individual strands. When you felt it together, you lose all that, and so the difference is pretty dramatic. I imagine using a thicker, heavier yarn for the split splicing/felting technique would just work a whole lot better.

04.03.14 blocking now — very excited! I did a conditioner rinse, because I found this cowl just ever-so-slightly itchy when I put it on, although it went away the longer I wore it. I can be somewhat sensitive to some types of wool.

The final piece is measuring 29.5 x 14 inches, so a little longer than the pattern, and exactly as wide.

We are getting snow today, which totally sucks in April, but at least I will have a cozy new cowl to wear.