A year or two into our marriage, my darling wanted me to knit him a scarf. I had two partial balls of yarn. Electric yellow and neon purple. No spare cash for more yarn. He said he’d wear it in those colours, so I set about trying to figure out how to make it without cutting the yarn. I had too little yarn to waste any.

I tried to do a checkerboard pattern, but the back side of intarsia blocks isn’t all that pretty. My only guide on this ‘adventure’ was my little green How To book.

I decided on a smaller stitch pattern. (I must have been crazy!)
Stockinette and change colour - intarsia-wise - at every stitch. (I was certifiable!)

I actually dropped the yarn just used and picked up the other from under it - at every stitch. What did I know!? My little green how-to book just said to always pick up the new colour from beneath the old, and that’s exactly what I did. Oy! The tangles! I’m sure I spent more time untangling the yarn balls than actually knitting.

It actually does look very good on both sides, but … (There’s always a but, eh?) it is stockinette. Tightly worked stockinette. (I worked it too tightly.) It did what stockinette does, but that I was only just learning about. It curled tightly from both sides and from both ends. Nothing I tried could make it stay flat! After hearing Himself complain every day about its rolling up into a scroll-like tube under his coat, I came up with the fastest solution that came to mind. I abutted the long edges, sewed the two long edges together, and then turned it seam-side-inside. Bingo!! It lies flat! He wanted to wear it folded in half anyway, and this solved the rolling problem.
Unfortunately, the equally pretty inside doesn’t show, except in the photo he just took this morning.

Photos from top to bottom:
close-up of front side;
most of scarf with back neck looped up;
seamed back side;
cuff rolled from one end to show inside;
cuff rolled from one end to show inside - a tad closer;
most of scarf again.

I would like to know if I am the only knitter so ignorant (or so insane) as to make such a fabric. I told him that it is a unique piece of knitting.

Best of all! He still wears it forty+ years later! Yes, of course I’ve knitted him others in more muted/’manly’ colours, and they’re softer too, but he seems to prefer this one over them.

Also, if you notice the stitches look a tad ‘off’, that’s because I was still purling the way my grandmother had taught me - wrapping the yarn the ‘wrong’ way around the needle and not working into the back loop on the next knit row. That results in every other front side row having twisted stitches. Sturdy fabric, such as she needed for her Depression Era babies, but REALLY stiff fabric the way I knitted it.
It was awhile later that I re-taught my fingers to purl the same way as most others; that made working intricate stitch patterns infinitely easier!

Now that I’ve handled and examined a real Cowichan sweater and spent too much time online reading about knitting from around the planet, I know that what I did way back then is properly called twined knitting. Nothing new under the sun!