This pattern has been in my queue for a few years now. (Then again, so have 1200 other things.) So having it be /r/knitting’s first KAL project made me happy to be able to cross it off the list. (Now, if only I hadn’t added 7 or 8 things to that same list in the course of making it.)

PATTERN:
The Age of Brass and Steam kerchief, from Orange Flower.

I’m not going to lie-- this pattern is basically a cake walk. If you can knit, purl, yarn-over, and k2 tog, you’ve got everything you need to make it under your belt. (Also, casting on and binding off. Unless you like walking around with a pair of circular needles along the bottom edge of your scarf. Y’know, as a fashion statement.) It’s pretty much just large swaths of stockinette stitch interspersed with the occasional garter eyelet row. I decided to make it a little more interesting by adding in a few mods.

I don’t want to sound like I’m knocking the pattern. It’s plainly, cleanly written, not to mention easy to knock out in a few days of off-and-on knitting. I think that it would make a very good unisex gift pattern, depending on color selection, given how quickly it works up. Not every pattern has to be cables everywhere/complex assemblage/intricate colorwork/etc. Since I’ve been having a bit of knitter’s block lately on the various projects I have kicking around, it was actually kind of relaxing to just work on the basics.

I did learn one new technique from this pattern-- the garter tab cast-on for a top-down triangular scarf.
I really liked how neatly it matched up with the rest of the border, as well as how it was less fiddly than the usual set of increases over 2-3 starting stitches. If I wind up writing up more shawl patterns, I think I might switch to garter tab.

I bound off with Jeny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Cast-Off, which I think was actually too stretchy, as it caused the BO edge to ruffle. I had to block it pretty firmly to remove most of the irregularity. Unfortunately, there’s only so much blocking can do, as it’s already springing back to its former frilly self.

MODS:

• I went with fingering-weight yarn on a 4.00 mm needle.
• I also (obviously) went with two colors. The striping pattern is planned-random, though I made sure the eyelets were always in blue and the rows directly beneath them were in orange.
• I increased the row count between eyelets by about 2-4 and added a 4th half-width row to use up a little more yarn.

YARN:
Yarn Place Chaussant and Knit Picks Stroll Tonal.

The Stroll Tonal is pretty much identical to any other hank of Stroll, be it solid, heathered, or bare, in texture/sproing. The colorway, Foliage, is less “tonal” and more “analogous colors” (pretty common to a lot of the yarn’s colorways), but given that it’s being used as an accent instead of taking center stage, the pooling that seems to occur in a lot of other FOs using Stroll Tonal isn’t given a chance to happen here.

The Chaussant was a dye experiment on my part. It wasn’t entirely successful, but it wasn’t unsuccessful, either, if that makes sense. I was hoping for a richer charcoal-y grey, which I obviously didn’t get. At least the color I wound up with isn’t too offensive.

(Also weighing in on the less-than-successful side, I didn’t set the dye on it as well as I should have. :/ The color bled into the orange slightly when it was being washed and blocked, which is why the pinned-out shot looks slightly different from the on-the needles view. )

As far as the yarn itself goes, if it hadn’t been the color I was looking for, more or less, I probably wouldn’t have used it for a scarf. It’s not soft, not by a long shot. There’s a crunchiness/sheen to it I can’t really describe-- slightly plastic-y, maybe? The yarn softened a little after washing and blocking, but I think it’s probably best suited to things that don’t go around your neck.

OTHER:

I unintentionally went Reddit-themed when picking out the colors for this scarf. I’d originally planned to have a grey-orange combination. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, the yarn turned out to be less “charcoal” and more “cadet” than I thought, so I wound up with blue-orange instead.

I’m currently having face issues (ZOMG stress-related disaster zone), so I decided to break out the GIANT SQUID substitute for modeled shots.

… It was a little difficult, seeing as squids generally don’t have necks as such. Also, he demanded to hold the guitar before he’d let me take a picture. Poseur.