Koigu Saroyan

Today's post marks the conclusion of scarf week! It seems like scarves are all I talked about this week, I guess it makes sense since this has been the coldest week of the winter here in Montreal, it's hard not to think about scarves during times like this!

My koigu saroyan scarf is my first FO of 2011. Last night I finished another project too, I'll blog about that one later when I've got some good FO shots of it. For today, it's all about the scarf. This gorgeous, very long, skinny scarf.

I did 5 repeats of the increase section, knit straight for 23 more repeats, and then finished off with 5 decrease repeats. My finished scarf is 7" wide and 86" long, that's over 7' long! It's long, but it's still very light and lovely. It's exactly what I was hoping for.

This scarf took two full skeins of Koigu kpppm in colourway P118 and was knit on 4mm needles.

I blocked it using blocking wires for the long straight edge, and a pin or two in each leaf. I love the way that each loop picked up by the wire creates this gorgeous little lacy edge on the straight garter stitch side. It's so pretty.

While I was knitting this, I had a couple concerns, the first was that the busy-ness of the yarn colour would distract too much from the leaves, not so, the leaves are crisp and clear! Secondly, I was worried that I should have possibly knit the whole flat section in garter stitch rather then only a small garter stitch border flanking so much stockinette stitch to prevent it from rolling in on itself too much, but in the end, it rolls a bit, but not so much so that you can't see the leaf detail, which is the important part. If I were to knit this pattern again in fingering weight yarn I would consider doing it all in garter stitch (except for the leaves) just to see if it really makes a difference.

The yarn in lovely. It was my first time knitting with koigu and though I don't think I would use it for socks since it's quite a thin 2 ply and I would worry about the socks durability, the colourway is so interesting. I love the spots of multicolour on the light background, I don't know how they do it, but it's really special.

One of my favorite things about this pattern is the simplicity and straightforwardness in which it's written. You can really alter it to make it exactly the size you want by doing more or less increase sections, and because its knit from end to end and not from side to side, by weighing the yarn used to increase and knitting straight until you have the same amount of yarn left when you start the decreases, you can use up every last bit of yarn.

Ravelry project page here.