Tag Archives: Jared Flood Noro scarf

Noro knits

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You’ve seen this scarf here before. If you search my blog for Jared Flood Noro Scarf you’ll find them all. All 12 others of them. Flood doesn’t take the credit for this design, but since he’s who wrote a pattern alternating between stripes from different skeins of Noro Silk Garden, I’m completely willing to give him full credit.

You just put your knitting on auto-pilot and let the beautiful Noro Silk Garden do it’s color-changing thing.

People sometimes like the look of the color combination enough to ask me what colorways I used. It’s these two: colorway 423

and colorway 373.

If you’re like me you look at these skeins and then you look at the resultant scarf and it’s hard to see how these skeins turned into this scarf. The magic of Noro. Just go with the flow, including sometimes the lack of flow when you encounter a knot and an abrupt color change. It works out…more or less.

If you’ve one skein of Silk Garden then Laura Aylor’s cute Dust Devils mitts might interest your needles. I actually used 1.15 skeins (57 grams) for mine because I lengthened the wrist and hand sections and widened the cuff. But they’re totally excellent if you decide to follow the pattern exactly.

Here’s another view of the same mitts, flipped over, knit in colorway 494.

This is SUCH a cleverly constructed pattern. They’re worked in the round so no seaming.

The pattern is exactly correct as written. If you think otherwise, respectfully, you’re mistaken. Maybe you miscounted in the short rows or missed or duplicated a row. (I did that a few times and had to rip back to start a section over.)

If you want your mitts to match mine, my modifications will lengthen (and widen) the cast-on and cuff. I cast on and knit the first 10 rounds of the cuff (section 1) in size 8 US needles. Then I moved down to a size 6 for the rest of the cuff and the body of the mitt. I knit 25 (not 18) rounds before working what appears as round 19 in the pattern.

I followed the pattern exactly after that except I also wanted to lengthen the body of the mitt and shape the top a bit more: I worked 11 garter stitch rounds in Section 6. In Round 4 of Section 6 I: K1, K2tog, K15, k2tog, K to the end. In round 10 I: K1, K2tog, K14, K2tog, K to the end. I know. None of that makes a bit of sense unless you’ve got stitches on your needles and are working the pattern.

I don’t want to offer so many tips that I make this pattern sound difficult. Because it isn’t. It’s just garter stitch and short rows. But. If you’re using doublepoints you’ll avoid holes by keeping the fabric from being stressed at the turns. That’s accomplished by redistributing the stitches more evenly on the needles. And in Section 4 at Round 16 the stitch count works by purling 15, then working the 14 bind-off stitches without disturbing the first 15 stitches. In other words, don’t use the 15th stitch as part of your bind-off.

All right. Too much hand holding. Here’s my second pair:

Now, flipped over to see more about how this colorway 213 worked out.

Some knitters’ Ravelry project pages are stressing about right side/wrong side. Honestly, I don’t get that. There’s so much going on with these colors and knitting switchbacks that I don’t see how that matters. They work well on hands. And each hand can wear either mitten.

These proved very interesting to my knitworthies who are younger than me and more hip. Gosh. Sort of everyone is younger and more hip than me.

Scarf weather approaches

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Isn’t this just the cat’s meow? It’s a free pattern, Mosaic Tile Scarf, by Gail Tanquary. I bought the kit a few weeks ago at one of Michigan’s very cool northern yarn shops, The Dutch Oven Bakery and Yarn Shop. Being a kit, I ended up using exactly the yarn called for in the pattern. I don’t do that all that often. So, the off-white is Crystal Palace Allegro DK. And the star of the scarf is Crystal Palace Mochi Plus, an Aran weight that’s 80% merino, 20% nylon. Using two weights of yarn really makes the self-striping Mochi Plus patterning pop.

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This is a slipped stitch pattern, so every pair of rows is worked with just one of the colors. The color changes are hidden in that nice I-cord edging. And even when it flips over and knitwits wear it upside down, it won’t look too horrid.

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Here’s yet another Noro Striped Scarf. Jared Flood doesn’t take the credit for this, but since I believe he’s who wrote a pattern alternating between stripes from different skeins of Noro Silk Garden, I’m completely willing to give him full credit.

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Nearly 15,000 Ravelers have knitted this scarf and posted it on their project page. This time my two colorways were 382 and 337. A mostly pink red and a mostly blue green skein. Two skeins of each colorway. I made mine a bit wider than the pattern called for by casting on 45 stitches. I slipped the first and last stitch of the second set of each rows, purlwise, to give it a nice finished edge.

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Any way you fold it, this scarf looks great.

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Four skeins, at this width, ended up at 69 inches. So, plenty for multiple wraps around a neck. Here’s others that I’ve made. And another. The measure of a good pattern? I don’t have any of these anymore. I knit them. Friends and family choose them for their holiday presents.

April in Michigan: scarf weather

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This is an old friend. Well, a new version of an old friend: Lion Brand’s free Rib Sampler Scarf, pattern #70530AD. Wow. I wonder if Lion Brand really has published over 70,000 patterns. You’ll have to join their site to download it. There are 18 Rib Sampler Scarf projects posted on Ravelry and six of them are mine! Here’s another to check out.

katia_scarfThis time I knit my Rib Sampler in Katia’s Tundra, a wonderfully soft 50% wool, 40% acrylic, 10% rayon worsted weight with subtle color changes. I’ve always been partial to pink and brown combinations. I wanted a longer and wider scarf, so I modified the pattern and cast on 44 rather than 28 stitches. I lengthened the eight inch mistake and farrow rib sections to ten inches and the four inch garter stitch sections to five inches. I knit fourteen inches in the one by one rib in the neck section.

There is something totally rhythmic and soothing about knitting this scarf.

Speaking of “old friend” patterns, Jared Flood’s Noro Striped Scarf certainly qualifies. This is how my newest version started out: two skeins each of Noro Silk Garden, colors 349 and 374.

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And the magic of Noro produces this:

Noro_scarf2 Here’s another view:

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One of the benefits of living somewhere that sometimes just cannot get itself to warm is that we can enjoy scarves from September to April. And even though the April 4th forecast is calling for freezing rain in the lower peninsula and massive amounts of snow in the upper peninsula, I am not ready to exchange being a Michigander for someplace else.

Don’t feel deluged by this flood of Jared Flood scarves, but here’s more and more and more and more and more I’ve knit. Every one different. Every one gifted and gratefully received. In fact, I still haven’t made one for myself!

9′ 8″ Scarf

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This is a Jared Flood two-yarn scarf. He says he didn’t invent it, but he certainly popularized it. Choose two colorways of Noro. The striping effect is created by alternating the yarns every two rows. Flood recommends Noro Silk Garden, but this is Noro Kujaku. Kujaku is 85% wool, 15% acrylic. It feels a tad scratchy while you work with it. But soaking it in water with a bit of hair conditioner added in softened it up.

You may wonder why this scarf is of Dr. Who proportions. I did not plan to use it as a scarf. I planned to use it as a personal yarn bombing project for my new basement  workshop. That room has an air conditioning line running through a section of it with a chunky pipe covered over with black foam. In the workshop, it’s been spray-painted to match the wall and ceiling and it now blends in rather well. But as it winds through the servery area and into the workshop, it’s still the old black foam. My plan was to knit something very colorful and cover the piping. I think it would have looked nice and been quite the conversation piece (if anyone but us ever saw it).

It turned out to be one of those “best laid plans” gone awry. I didn’t realize, until I knitted up all six skeins of Kujaku, that the pipe is sometimes flush to the wall, sometimes not. Every few feet it is interrupted by a metal band that holds it in place, but I thought that would be manageable. I figured I would just wrap the pipe, length-wise, and sew my scarf into a tube. Once I looked more closely at the situation, I decided it wouldn’t work. It would just have looked kind of colorfully sloppy. Discouraged, I set it aside to ponder what to do with it.

I decided to donate my almost ten feet of knitted scarf to a United Way charity auction at work. Some of my co-workers got into a bit of a bidding war over it and it fetched a good price. Since then, I’ve been told it went to a Detroit Tigers World Series game. It didn’t bring our Tigers any luck, not one bit, but at least it kept one fan warm.

Wisdom scarf

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This is another scarf knitted in the Jared Flood way, in different colorways of yarn with slow color changes. The free pattern is here. Flood’s pattern calls for three colorways, in four skeins, of Noro Silk Garden. Knitted up that way, the scarfs are stunning. My three Silk Garden and one Kuroyon Noro knits are in the slide show below.

But knitting in Wisdom Yarns Poems decreases the impact on the pocket book quite remarkably. And all without any sacrifice in the beauty of the finished object. I usually cast on 45 for the Noro versions. This time I cast on 39 and ended up with a similarly sized, but somewhat longer scarf. Wisdom is 100% wool, but it’s is spun in a way that almost looks as if it has some mohair in it because there’s a bit of a fuzzy halo to the yarn.

Here’s the scarf before it was one:

 

And now another glimpse of the “after:”

For a slide show of my versions of this pattern, click on the thumbnails.

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