FO: Feather Duster Scarf

Happy Groundhog Day!

I didn’t take this with me to Las Vegas, but I did finish it up while I was home feeling too sick to do much of anything else.

Pattern: Feather Duster Scarf, another lovely pattern by Susan Lawrence
Ravelry: Project page, pattern page
Yarn: Knit Picks Alpaca Cloud, 1 skein, colorway Iris
Needles: US 6 / 4 mm

I started out with 4.5 mm needles (US 7), as specified in the pattern, but the result was looking really sloppy*, so I decided to switch to smaller needles. In hindsight, though, I wish I’d have continued with the larger needles (I guess I should have tried blocking out what I had before I ripped). Not that I’m unhappy with it, but I think the stitch pattern looks nicer when knit more loosely. Plus, I would have used up more of the skein of yarn – I had quite a bit left over, but not enough for another full repeat. I did do one more repeat than in the pattern, but since my gauge was a lot tighter, it ended up pretty close to the dimensions in the pattern. Actually, I blocked it out slightly larger, but even though I didn’t block it hard, it still shrank up quite a bit after blocking, and ended up being about 48″ across the wingspan and 22″ down the spine. It’s a nice size for a scarf, but if I were to do it again with the same yarn, I’d use the larger needles. Maybe I’d even go up to size 8.

The stitch pattern is deceptively simple, since it’s just a variation of feather-and-fan. A stitch offset effortlessly creates the pretty design. My biggest problem was managing to get the wrong number of YO’s on a frequent basis. Somehow I kept trying to do one less than I was supposed to, and I’d find myself at the end of the half-row with the wrong number of stitches left. Tink, tink, tink. I’m blaming the headaches. At least when I did have that kind of problem, I never had more than half a row to go back to find the error, and usually I’d notice it sooner.

* I’m actually not sure that my sloppy-looking results were an issue of the needle size anyway. I was trying out a pair of Knit Picks Zephyr needles for the first time – I bought one pair of tips to see what they were like, and thought they might work well with the slippery alpaca. I liked the feel of them, since they’re a little soft, and didn’t seem to put as much pressure on my fingers as metal ones – but the stitches looked really uneven. It was also really hard to work with the laceweight yarn using clear needles – it was hard to see the correct leg of the stitch, since you could see the opposite leg of the stitch through the needle. And the tips aren’t quite as sharp as the metal or wood ones, which made the decreases a little harder. I think if I’d been using the same size metal needle, my results would have been quite different. I definitely won’t try using these tips again for fine yarn or lace projects.