Thursday, October 26, 2006

The One Where I Include A Tip For Binding-Off The Irish Hiking Scarf



I finished Cousin Tim's scarf last night. The pattern said to knit for 55"...I only knit 53" because I was sick of knitting. But when I wet blocked it, I was able to stretch it out to about 63 inches.

Wow.

The color is actually a beautiful deep black but the picture was so dark that I had to lighten it so that it showed the cables (see pic in the previous post for the true color). I love the way this scarf looks blocked because you can clearly see each cabled and ribbed section. Many people do not like to block cables because they think that it will flatten their beautiful work. I've found that if you wet block cabled pieces instead of steam blocking them, you preserve their fluffiness AND make their stitches more beautiful.

When I knit my brother's scarf, I noticed that the bound-off edge flared like crazy, making its width MUCH wider than the cast-on edge...and blocking it didn't cure the problem enough to satisfy me. Of course this drove me crazy. I wanted to see if I was the only one who had this problem, so I looked at other completed scarves throughout blogland and saw pictures showing that they had the same problem...but they just left it as is.

I didn't like that, so I bound-off again using SIZE 5 needles (the scarf is knit with size 8 needles) and it matched the width of the cast-on edge.

I'm sharing this because ya'll know I love you, right?

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