Sparkly Yet Manly

Sparkly Yet Manly Scarf
Yarn: Dream in Color Stardust, in their darkest colour
Needles: 3mm Addi lace turbos
Pattern: plain mistake rib, in a parallelogram shape

Notes: A few years ago, I knit The Limey a fairly plain 3x3 ribbed scarf, in aran-ish weight dead-muppet acrylic yarn. He loved it and wore it everywhere until last winter, when we (ahem, I) left it at a pub. I kept promising to knit him a new one, but he really liked the dead-muppet acrylic, which had been discontinued.

This stalemate continued until I found a skein of Dream in Color Stardust (Ravelry link), in its "Experimentals" range at the iKnit stall at the iKnit weekender in September. I got it in its darkest colour, which is black-ish, but actually has lots of dark purples and blues in it. Most importantly, it was sparkly! There was no way The Limey wasn't going to like it.

(Turns out it's really hard to photograph sparkle.)

The problem? It's sock-weight yarn and I only got one skein. It turns out I was lucky, and just managed to eek out a decent-length scarf. I'm not sure if you can see it in the top picture, but it's not a rectangle- it's shaped like this:


I started with just two stitches, increased one stitch every other row until it was the width I wanted, knit straight until I felt I had just enough yarn to do the end, then decreased every other row back to two stitches. I did this to get as much length as I could out of the yarn, and I think it worked- he can wrap it once around his neck and still have the ends hang down long enough to be comfortable and not unwrap. I think if I'd just done a plain rectangle, it wouldn't have been long enough.

Now he can stop looking pointedly at me while whining about how cold his neck is.