For your neck

Felt Head is wearing Diamond in the Rough, a Baah Yarn scarf. Baah set the price at $6 and it’s available (for that price) on Ravelry. The local yarn shop where I bought my skein of La Jolla, a 100% merino fingering weight, said the pattern was free and gave me a copy. They are, excuse me were, a reputable shop that I assume had Baah’s permission to distribute the pattern for free with a purchase. I don’t whine about pattern prices on this blog or in the real world either. But I make an exception for $6 for a three-stitch repeat across every row of the scarf. C’mon–I’m definitely going to bleat to Baah about that!

This planned pooling pattern is supposed to work well with Baah Yarn’s “dipped and dappled” La Jolla. I used the Tequila Sunset colorway.

I’ve knit this pattern, twice, in Baah’s Savannah. The planned pooling worked out great.

The pattern says it’s designed for both Savannah and LaJolla. It’s also supposed to work itself into a plaid (sort of) in LaJolla. This time it didn’t work as well as I’d have liked. In the center part of the scarf the pooling worked perfectly. I have a rough but fairly distinct plaid. But on both ends? The patterning is dramatically off. I thought maybe the first part of the skein was dyed incorrectly. The end section is “off” in a similar way.

It’s still pretty. Well, except for the sections that look like long drips of blood. So, not what I expected or hoped for.

I have one more skein of LaJolla in my stash. I may give Diamond in the Rough one more try sometime soon.

LaJolla is fairly expensive yarn, in the $30 range for 400 yards. Noro Transitions is competitive with LaJolla price-wise per 130-yard skein. Actually, was competitive. It’s been discontinued. But I found a few skeins at a deep discount. Transitions is 51% Wool/ 14% Silk/ 7% Cashmere/ 7% Angora/ 7% Alpaca/ 7% Mohair/ 7%Camel. Yep. You can’t make that up!

I used Purl Soho’s free mistake rib scarf pattern. Mistake rib works with any multiple of 4, plus 3 stitches. I cast on 23 stitches, which turned out to be about six inches wide, using size 11 US needles. I knitted until both my skeins were exhausted. This kind of knitting goes so very, very quickly that there’s no chance the knitter will be exhausted by the effort. I ended up with a 60-inch scarf.

You’re wondering what Wool/Silk/Cashmere/Angora/Alpaca/Mohair/Camel yarn feels like? As the skein progresses, through (apparently) a series of blends of fiber, one fiber or the other dominates. I could distinguish the wool, the angora and definitely the silky sections. The other fibers are less familiar to me so I didn’t recognize the feel–except, different. It’s a fun super bulky and if you can find any skeins I recommend it for a quick knit.