Hitchhiker

The problem with buying yarn without a project in mind is that it sits in the stash for quite a while as there is the tendency to purchase yarn for a specific project rather than look in the stash. This is how my stash is mostly sock yarn as there is always enough in 100 grams to knit a pair of socks.

Except, sometimes you don’t want to knit socks or you just have to knit a certain pattern or you “need” a certain item. So the sock yarn still sits in the stash even though it, ostensibly, has a purpose.

And then there is the yarn that you are not sure if you even want to make socks with. Such was the case with this yarn.

I purchased three “skeins” of this yarn at different times and I paid full price for this one.



The second skein I purchased became thesesocks. From knitting those I found that the yarn is more colour block than self-striping, the yarn looks crinkly after being reknitted and the stitches look a bit odd where the colour changes occurred. (At the colour changes a stitch from the original skein is made up of tw0 colours.)

The yarn is a long scarf and you could just use it as a scarf but really that is too easy – why not knit it into another scarf? This would solve three problems. The colour changes might not look so strange, I had an idea of how the striping looked, I could use the whole skein, no adding small amounts to my stash. There was no point in knitting a standard scarf from a scarf so I chose Hitchhiker. A pattern I had had for a while but I felt needed more than a single-toned yarn. Plus it was an easy pattern and I always like to have one of those on the go. Although I have no idea what will be my next easy project.

I was a little unsure of how big (or small) this would turn out. The original pattern uses 150 gram skein of Wollmeise which is 525 metres. My yarn was 100 grams and 420 metres, enough for a scarf plus I could always unravel it if I didn’t like the end result. Needle choice was easy; for this trip I packed a couple of sets of DPNs for socks and my interchangables, so I used size 3.5 mm, the smallest size in the set.

The crinkliness of the yarn shows much more in garter stitch but it looks like it has been worked in a boucle yarn. I could wet block it to see if that makes a difference but as I am currently on the Washington peninsular I am not going to try.