As I blogged about just a few hours ago, I went into Rhinebeck this year determined to buy only enough yarn for two holiday scarfs — one for Andy's niece and another for his nephew Logan. For Logan, I bought two shades of yarn from the This and That Farm of Danby, VT. The yarn was soft, two-ply como. The larger ball was 212 yards (4 oz) and was a blueish-greenish shade, and the smaller ball was 96 yards (1 oz) in a marigold shade.
Initially, I thought that I would make the scarf with the blue-green yarn and then anchor the scarf's plain pattern with a marigold/blue-green checkerboard motif at each end of the scarf. As I got closer to making the scarf though, I decided to replace the checkerboard pattern with a moon and stars motif because Logan loves looking at, and talking about, the moon (he is 4). Making that decision though meant I would embark upon a more difficult designing adventure though as I quickly realized I would have to probably design the moon and stars motif.
I looked on Ravelry, and a few children's patterns books, and couldn't find any moon and stars patterns that I liked or would work for the scarf. I did find though this moon and stars blanket pattern from Crystal Palace Yarns, and thought that the way the crescent moon worked with stars looked quite nice, so used it as inspiration to design my own set of moon and stars (the Crystal Palace pattern used much different dimensions than what I needed for the scarf and I didn't quite like the exact design of the stars as I wanted my stars to be a bit "lighter" so had to basically redraw and graph it, but the Crystal Palace pattern heavily influenced the overall design). I ended up coming up with pattern below, which works over 19 stitches (I put it on a 22 stitch-long scarf). I put the pattern on top of a seed stitch pattern, as I learned from Ravelry that that would be the best way to keep the scarf flat without rolling (even when I've done garter or slip stitch borders in the past, there has always been a bit of curling, which I wanted to avoid here because of the size of the scarf.
The pattern, seed stitch, and yarn worked wonderfully together to create an AWESOME scarf! I was incredibly happy with it, and look forward to doing future colorwork.
Here are the final details of the project:
Yarn: This and That Farm Como Wool, approx. 2/3 of main color used and approx. 1/3 of contrast color, so maybe 180 – 200 yards used
Needles: Size 6 Circular
Stitches: 22 stitches cast-on (21-stitch pattern graphic below excludes one plain row on the left side for some reason)
Post-Blocking Measurements: 5 inches wide by 40 1/2 inches long, with the pattern itself taking up approximately 7 inches of each side of the scarf and the pattern portion of the scarf being 4 3/4 inches wide (slightly tighter than the main part of the scarf).
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