Craft in Progress: knitted silk scarf
A friend gave me some beautiful hand-painted silk yarn: Royal Silk by ArtYarns. Now sold as Regal Silk, it comes in a 50 g skein that is 163 yards (149 metres) long. I'd been given one skein, and wanted to find the perfect project that would show off this gorgeous yarn and waste none of it. A scarf sounded ideal: I can't wear wool, and don't like anything heavy around my neck, so a featherlight scarf would be perfect. Besides, I always knit for others and it was high time I made something for myself!
I'd never worked with silk before, so consulted the lovely folks at LiveJournal's knitting community for advice on handling it. People advised me that silk is very strong, but that it might snag on my fingers. They suggested I not follow my usual practice of simply starting to knit, trying various stitch patterns and needle sizes, and then frogging and reusing the yarn once I'd decided.
However, I simply had to follow my own instincts, and very carefully tried several open and lacy patterns. I was tempted by the purse stitch that was used to splendid effect with the same yarn by Katinka, but decided against it because the quantity of yarn would have yielded a shorter scarf than would suit me. (I'm quite tall, and wanted a scarf that would wrap a couple of times and still hang down very long.)
In the end, I chose a simple drop stitch pattern: basically, do garter stitch (knit every row) but on every fourth row, wrap the yarn twice around the needles after each knit stitch (except the final stitch of the row). On the following row, drop all the wrapped stitches.
The yarn is wonderfully soft and snags much less than I'd heard it might. It held up just fine to being knitted and re-knitted, probably because I took care to knit very gently and loosely. It looks pretty already, and I'm very eager to see how it turns out once it's finished and blocked.
