This is the pattern I invented for my Noro Ito yarn. Ito comes in lots of different colorways, and its uneven texture and bright colors lend themselves to something a little larger, that will allow the bulky hand-spun texture to harmonize with the design. The pattern uses slipped stitches to create both vertical and horizontal bars to make a plaid.

It is knit on the diagonal, with an i-cord binding worked as you go. The black yarn casts shadows in some areas, and the colors just pop in others. And the diagonal placement of the plaid creates a scarf that has much more energy and allows for more variation, than plain horizontal or vertical stripes.

I hate burying tails when I finish knitting, so one of the first things I did was to invent a way to cast-on the i-cord so that it doesn’t need to be grafted together later. It is cast-on as a smooth, continuous cord that travels up both sides of the scarf, using a modified version of Judy’s magical cast-on: using both ends of a single circular needle and then sliding the stitches together on the wire to form the first row. If you do it right, you will have only one tail to bury when you finish your work.

Plaid lends itself to many different variations. When I prototyped this scarf, I didn’t follow a chart, just experimented with widths and colors of the bars. I couldn’t chart out all the variations, so I settled on one section that looked nice, and lent itself to repetition. You can repeat it as many times as you’d like, to customize the length. But once you have mastered the basic concepts, you can invent your own plaid to suit your taste.

You’ll need size 10 circular needles (I prefer 24 inch circumference but you could use something smaller). 1/2 ball of Noro Ito, and around 300 yards of bulky black yarn. The pattern is available for immediate download, so you should be able to start knitting right away.