fo: unexpected stripey noro scarf

the popularity of noro yarns has always been a bit of a mystery to me. one of my very early knitting projects was the infamous booga bag, which was all over the knit blog world at the time. of course, i knit it with noro kureyon. i found the whole process to be utterly miserable. it’s hard on the hands, there were multiple knots in every skein, and, ferchristsake, there were twigs and wood debris right in the yarn! not to mention, and i know this is sacrilegious, i’m personally not a huge fan of the noro colorways. dare i say i find them garish? and, i absolutely love bright colors.

several years later, i found myself drawn to the noro striped scarf brought forth into the world by brooklyntweed. i admired the colors and the lovely stripeyness, but when i saw these socks over at the split yarn blog i went over the edge. absolutely swoon worthy. a few days later, i found myself at little knits (one of the coolest yarn stores in seattle, btw) and they had a great price on silk garden. i caved.

(Ravel It!)
pattern: noro striped scarf
yarn: 2 skeins each of noro silk garden colors 241 and 282
needles: US 7 addi circ

i bought two skeins each of three colorways, knowing that i’d end up using just two of them for this project. surprisingly, i ended up going with two colorways that created fairly subtle stripes. they are very different in saturation of color, but both are primarily purples with some blue, green, and a little pink thrown in. the result is that the stripes through most of the scarf very faint, purple on purple for example. although there are a few spots where they are quite obvious, green and pink.

i love the effect. it is a really beautiful scarf. i also surprisingly found that i did enjoy knitting with the silk garden. much, much softer and more pleasant that kureyon. i’m really happy with this knit and can’t wait to get more use out of it later in the winter.  incidentally, it was a really quick project.  the knitting went very fast and i finished it in just a few days.

i was at the beach earlier this week and the scarf got a little photo shoot, which was also my first time using my new tripod. you’ll have to ignore the fact that it is 80 degrees and i’ve got a sunburn in this last photo.