Yes I am back with my knitting and keeping it simple I have gone for a basic pattern with a horizontal rib scarf.
This is nice and chunky so will keep the cold out next winter as well as being quite soft and not itchy.
Making it:
For this I have used James C Brett marble chunky glamour yarn. Unfortunately this has been discontinued but normal marble chunky is still available and will knit up in the same way. The 'glamour' bit was only a thin strand of shimmer which frankly, I can give or take. I used 6mm needles for this and cast on 26 stitches using the long tail cast on.
The pattern is fairly simple as it is a 3 row repeat:
Row 1&2 knit all
Row 3 purl all.
To keep my edges neat I always slipped the first stich purl wise and always knitted the last stitch - even on a purl row.
It did knit up fairly quickly and I soon had a scarf amost as tall as me (5'10") so I cast off fairly loosely and weaved the ends in. This can be made easier by casting off using a slightly bigger needle to give a less tight cast off. Here I used a 6.5mm one and the result did work well.
The yarn:
Ok I was not a big fan of the yarn. It is 99% premium acrylic, which isn't a major issue, and 1% polyester. I will assume the strand of shimmed made up this 1%. It looks like the main yarn is made up from two different coloured strands of roving which were loosely twisted together. Where one of the strands changes colour at different intervals from a yellow olive like colour through greens to blue and back, the other strand stays the same green. This does work well on the finished item theee is little in the way of colour pooling.
The problem I had was the light twist did come undone a bit and although I didn't split the actual yarn I was often catching the stand of shimmer or splitting it off from the rest of the yarn. This resulted in broken strand of shimmer hanging down which had to be trimmed off.
I also couldn't get over the slight plasticky feel the yarn had, this was despite the 'premium acrylic' claim. I have used other acrylic yarns in the past which had a better feel than this. However, in the finished item this is less noticeable so that is a good thing.
Now the biggest problem was that there were 3 knots in my yarn. One knot is bad enough by 3? Shall we say I was NOT happy. The first knot I hadn't noticed until it was almost on my needle and the was the yarn is made makes id difficult to tink the stitches and I had mo wish to frog back so as it was a solid knot and it was a scarf I knitted through it.
The next one I saw early on and it was bigger so I cut it out and reattached the yarn and carried on. Ok I did loose perhaps 10cm of yarn doing this but it worked. The last one I spotted it early enough so cast off about one repeat earlier than I had intended but it didn't lose that much in the end.
I couldn't have done the Russian join due to how the yarn is constructed and the magic knot may have been too noticeable.
The needles:
The needles were basic plastic 6mm needles so there is not much I can really say about them. I found they did grip the yarn quite a bit, as plastic ones do to acrylic yarn but that wasn't anything major.
Would I make this again - possibly but with a different yarn as this one was just not for me Your experience of it could differ.
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