Straight Off the Vine

Last week I was working on a Flower Vine Scarf from a pattern in this book:

The pattern calls for bulky weight wool (size 10 needles). The yarn I ended up using is Ella Rae Bamboo Silk (size 7 needles) in Apple (The pink is for the flowers, but I can't remember the color name). I really like knitting with it. It's super-soft and smooth. My LYS suggested I use size 8 needles and increase the number of cast on stitches by 100 to make sure it would be long enough.

Here's the scarf at the 300-stitch stage:

A close-up:

It's starting to curl already! Then, I had to increase at each stitch (600 stitches). And then, increase at every stitch again. That's 1200 stitches people. This is what 1200 stitches looks like:

There's just a wee bit of my needles peeking out of all those stitches. The pattern only has 6 rows, but it sure took me a long time to knit a row with 1200 stitches.

Here is what the scarf is supposed to look like:

And here is what mine looked like after binding off:

It spiraled pretty nicely for about the first 50 or so stitches bound off, but then it started forming something more like V-shapes rather than spirals. I probably should have used a bulkier weight yarn, but I'm hoping I can change the pattern somehow to make it look better. I'm going to take it to my LYS tomorrow. I'm guessing there's definitely going to be some frogging involved :( especially since it ended up being about 10 feet long instead of the 5.5 feet in the original pattern. I'm thinking I need to start over and use the prescribed number of cast-on stitches and maybe increase the number of rows to make it more bulky so it will curve instead of bending into a sharp angle. I haven't tried knitting the flowers yet, but they are made from the same pattern with fewer stitches cast on.

In household news, our dryer started making some crazy noises yesterday, prompting the Gnome to turn it off and take it apart completely. Nothing appeared to be wrong with it. Once it was back together, we started it up, and it sounded fine until we put clothes in it. Spooky noises again. Then, as mysteriously as they began, they stopped. I have a load drying right now. Sounds fine. Maybe we have a haunted dryer :) Just in case, we have been researching front-loading washers and dryers. Anybody have any front-loading recommendations?

Stay tuned for pictures from our local pumpkin festival :) The weather has been lovely here...until today. It's really overcast and rain's a'comin'.


Leaf out.