Stripes and Solids

I’m way behind on sharing my progress on the Warm Hands Network project! I’ve been steadily knitting neckwarmer after neckwarmer and steam blocked five of them the other day. How ridiculous they look with bibs pinned flat and their turtlenecks standing tall like so many nuclear reactors!

I learned something during the pinning process. While it was obvious that a neckwarmer’s outer edge should be square, I didn’t realize until pinning a striped one that the inner edge of the bib, just before the ribbed turtleneck begins, should be square too! A neckwarmer pinned in both places comes out smooooth.

When DH saw my blocking set-up, clear plastic laid over a dressmaker’s cutting board, which was leaning against the wall while the neckwarmers dried, he told me that it looked like an art gallery installation! lol

‘Woolen Geometry at Rest’:

I knitted the first two striped neckwarmers over the span of only four days, which seemed fast to me. You may remember I sat for a long spell as a passenger, which gave me a good start on their turtleneck sections.

I had plenty of both the burgundy and blue yarns for the one and no problems while knitting it. The burgundy, a very soft four-ply tweed, was very nice to knit with. Smooshy! While I knitted the blue stripes with a two and a three-ply yarn held together. The difference in weight between the two colors of stripes is barely noticeable in the finished fabric.

Unfortunately things didn’t go nearly as smoothly with the brown and green one. First I had to rip back several rounds so I could correct an Obvious mistake I’d made in the corner increases. Then I ran out of both yarns! First went the olive, leaving the last green stripe one round short. Once I’d measured the remaining brown yardage, I moved on to the garter stitch border, which meant I skipped an entire four-round brown stripe.

With DH’s help I could see that a neckwarmer bib that’s two stripes short still works fine!

After two striped neckwarmers in a row, I was ready for some fast and easy knitting! The first solid-colored one took two-and-a-half ounces from a three-ounce skein of Wool Ease Green Heather.

And I knit the second from a skein of vintage Colonial Blue Caron 100% wool. It’s odd, but this wool yarn felt less wool-like than the Wool-Ease, which is actually only 10% wool. It dragged on my needles like the worst of vintage acrylics, so I did a burn test on it just to make sure that it was really wool!

Having finished two solids I was once again ready to make a striped neckwarmer using several scrap balls. I held a strand of Jungle Green sport yarn together with a strand of the fingering weight hand-dyed yarn sitting next to it to make that middle stripe. I really like how the two yarns’ colors mingle!

I won’t soon forget how many yarn ends I had to weave in because of all the color changes…

but, considering how pretty this neckwarmer is, I think it was worth the extra fiddling.

Warm Hands Network Tally:

Seven Neckwarmers…

and One Cowl.