Now that I’ve sorted out the design and simplified it, the Emerald Keep Scarf is coming along very nicely.  Last week, I talked about the difficulties I was having with it and how the design process was coming – or, as it turns out, not coming.  This weekend I got almost 18 inches done.  At this rate, I’ll be done by the end of next weekend or the middle of the week following, well in advance of the start of the Keepsake Book Tour.

The stitch is a simple pattern from Barbara Walker’s A Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns called Two-Color Star Stitch.  I find her books invaluable in designing projects because she puts the knitter in the driver’s seat.  Through teaching how the fabric works inherently, to how geometric designs are created by the yearn, a knitter can go from a basic student of the subject to a designer in very short order.  I have a long way to go before I’m a master knitter, but I am a lot closer to the goal because of her books.  I highly recommend them.

I’ve made this stitch pattern a couple times before, and I like its simple beauty.  This time, I selected an emerald green dark tone for the main color and a light mint for the accent.

The more I work with this pattern, I find that I like the reverse of the fabric just as much as the front.  It ends up looking almost beaded in texture, with neat edges on each side.

I cast on 30 stitches, since it’s multiples of 3; on size 7 needles the fabric is quite wide.  There’s a lot of horizontal stretch to it and it will curl (which is why I had such difficulty with edging it).  I don’t mind the curl in the finished design, it has its own beauty; I’ll still play around with some possibilities for edgings in future projects but since I needed this done for the book tour, I didn’t have the time.

I did have an interesting breakthrough as I was working it.  It finally it me that the colors are tied to the stitch order; meaning that row 2 is always Color A and row 4 is Color B.  I don’t need to keep track of the row count because I know which pattern row to work based on the color on the needle.  All wrong side rows are purled, so it’s an easy pattern to memorize – even for me, with the difficulty I have with 2D to 3D translation.

Keep your eyes peeled for the Keepsake Tour; it starts March 8th.  Emerald Keep is out on April 8th.