Well, almost reversible.

I made myself a Prismatic scarf following texturedknitter’s variation, in which you knit 3 and slip 3 in a diagonal pattern on both sides. (In the original pattern, you knit 3 and slip 3 on the front while you knit 3 and purl 3 on the back.) As texturedknitter observes in her notes, this rendition isn’t reversible but comes closer than the Prismatic pattern.

As I was knitting my scarf, I pondered why it wasn’t reversible. The only difference between the front and the back is that on the front, you knit the knits and slip the slips, while on the back you move everything to the right by one to create the diagonal movement. This means that on the back, you get shorter horizontal bars than on the front because you are knitting over the last stitch of the slipped section. I wondered if you could offset this by increasing the number of slipped stitches on the back by one, which would correspondingly increase the number of knit stitches on the front.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that this strategy worked. The front and back aren’t quite the same, but the thickness of the knit bands and the slipped bands are the same on both sides, so the difference is more subtle. The last photo shows this scarf side by side with the earlier slipped-on-both-sides version.

I cast on 27 stitches and knit as follows (all slips are with yarn in front):

k 3, (sl 3 k 4) 3 times, sl 3
k 3, (sl 3 k 3 sl 1) 3 times, sl 3
k 3, (k 1 sl 3 k 3) 3 times, sl 3
k 3, (sl 2 k 3 sl 2) 3 times, sl 3
k 3, (k 2 sl 3 k 2) 3 times, sl 3
k 3, (sl 1 k 3 sl 3) 3 times, sl 3
k 3, (k 3 sl 3 k 1) 3 times, sl 3
k 3, (k 3 sl 4) 3 times, sl 3
k 3, (k 4 sl 3) 3 times, sl 3
k 3, (k 2 sl 4 k 1) 3 times, sl 3
k 3, (sl 1 k 4 sl 2) 3 times, sl 3
k 3, (k 1 sl 4 k 2) 3 times, sl 3
k 3, (sl 2 k 4 sl 1) 3 times, sl 3
k 3, (sl 4 k 3) 3 times, sl 3

This might seem like a nightmare to follow, but it’s not too hard in practice. When the stripes slant to the left, you’re looking at the front side, so the stripes are k 4 sl 3 and you follow the stitches as you see them on the needle. When the stripes slant to the right, you’re looking at the back side, so the stripes are k 3 sl 4 and, except for the three I-cord edging stitches at either end, you move the stitches one to the right of what you see on the needle.

I planned to make this scarf for a friend and chose the colorway with her in mind. Unfortunately, she turned out to have a wool allergy, and with the scratchy mohair thrown into the mix she found the scarf completely unwearable. So I gave it to another friend who loves orange and has no fiber allergies, and then picked out a nice alpaca yarn and eventually made a replacement.