WIP Wednesday: The Fifth Fourth Doctor Scarf (now with extra scarf!)

Hi all,

A person might think that since I've been on break from school for most of August, I would have found time to post. Not so! 9 hour work days so I can make some money and because I have no vacation and myriad weekend events sort of pre-empted all that. I still had time to buy yarn though...no worries there. Someday I'll round it all up from the two cities it's split between and take photographs of it and actually put it in Ravelry so that it officially exists. But today is not that day.

Today we're here to talk about the fifth scarf.

There are no blog entries about scarves 1 or 2 (although I did get to visit with scarf 2 in the wilds while working on scarf 5), but if you've been reading for a while you may remember the saga that was knitting both scarves 3 and 4 in a 2 month period and the colour issues that came up with scarf 4.
Well...this scarf is for the same recipient of 4, only with new and improved colours, more Shetland, and 1.75 times more scarf!!!!

The buyer is super great to work with and has commissioned me to make him another scarf even though I completely underdelivered on the first one I made him, and generally seems to think I'm pretty great to work with. So IDK, but I'll take it. Glad I'm doing something right despite feeling like I've screwed this up at every available opportunity. He bought all the yarn so he could make sure he was getting the colours he wanted (I don't fault him this at all), and he still wants a sport weight scarf so my good friends at Knit Picks aren't coming through with the colours I need in Wool of the Andes, so it's mostly not my beloved WoTA (although I still coo a bit at how much the green yarn sings off my needles when I get to it). It still has the mixed yarn source challenges of scarf 4, which I don't love since the edges aren't even, but will hopefully work themselves out in blocking at least a little bit. The biggest issue is that the Jamieson's Shetland is a DK and the rest of the yarn (Brown Sheep Nature Spun, Dalegarn Falk, and Knit Picks Wool of the Andes) are all sport weight, so the Jamieson's stitches are a lot tighter on the needles and the edges are a bit wider than the other yarns. Plus that yarn is still scratchy and grabby, which is ok if you drop a stitch, but doesn't let the stitches slide very well. Since I have the most of that yarn I'm knitting on metal needles instead of wood, which means the Brown Sheep slips a bit more. But I'm working it out. I just kind of still dread the Shetland sections. I know I should be one of those people that's like "oh, yay, super authentic Shetland wool!!", but I just don't like that yarn. The colours are right though, and it's not the most terrible thing, but if I had to choose yarn to knit with I don't think I would pick that.

The scarf is half done, in 3 pieces. I learned this AM that I cannot seam it together until I block it because otherwise it will block weird, so I spent 20 minutes whip stitching and then un-whip stitching this morning, but, you know, lessons learned. I've decided to weave in ends every time I finish a part (in the case of the duplicate part I'll just do it at the halfway point) and it's far less frustrating than doing it all together.

Scarf piece 1

Scarf piece 2

Scarf piece 3

The scarf so far (not seamed)

So...I have half a scarf. And I still don't mind doing it, but I'll admit that I'm ready to be done. I have so much lovely yarn in my stash waiting for me and I feel bad that I keep acquiring and not actually reducing...plus I've learned that there really are only so many hours a day you can knit this thing. So for the first time I'm not JUST working on the scarf. Instead I'm in never-ending swatch land with some delightful single-ply silk merino that I've had around forever, but that's not worth talking about now. For now, scarf is priority, I have a number of colours/rows to knit per day goal, and when I accomplish that I can do other things. It seems to be working alright.

Yarn Swap: Doctor Who (received)

My delightful (Pond-themed!!!!!) swap package arrived last week from knitika. I love it when packages come on Wednesdays, since Wednesdays (at least right now) are the WORST day of classes in my whole week and I’m always exhausted and sometimes angry at everything when I get home and the packages give me such a lift. This was no exception. I was hoping the whole way home that I’d have a box waiting at my door, and then I did!

The contents came wrapped in such beautiful paper that I didn’t want to open them (okay…that’s a lie, I totally still wanted to open them). Each has a quote to go with it, and it turned out that they were all perfectly themed. I SO envy the creativity in wrapping this!



First…

(I got to this part and said…OMG I KNOW WHAT THIS IS!!!!! because I LOVE the packaging this stuff ships in almost as much as I love the product)

Digital Nails in the Pandorica colourway. I had to resist just putting it on my nails immediately.



Next…

It’s a tablet cover out of the amazing Exploding TARDIS fabric that I love SO MUCH.

And...

My tablet totally fits! I cannot wait to take it to class with me tomorrow. I was SO about to break down and just order a tablet cover because the reality of me having time to make one was quickly becoming an illusion.

Then…

I have heard such great things about this book and I cannot wait to read it. I’m slating it for first thing in August once school wraps for the summer!

And…

I admit that I had NO IDEA what this might be. It was a little bit the best surprise that ever happened! I thought it might be cookies. It was WAY BETTER than cookies.


It’s an Exploding TARDIS poster. Which will go so very nicely with the Van Gogh prints I bought for my temp apartment. I’m going to head out and get it a frame this weekend and I already have the exact perfect spot!

Also…

Nerd Girl Yarns in the “Sunflowers” colourway on the sport weight base. I just…I love this yarn. I love it so much. I need to find the exact right thing for it to grow up to be.

AND!…



HAND KNIT THINGS MADE FROM BROOKLYN TWEED SHELTER. Which is totally as amazing feeling as I hoped it would be (and they smell great!). The colours are so pretty and I love them and I’m a little sad it’s July because I wanted to put these mittens on and not take them off. I tried to take a photo of me with the mittens, but it turns out it’s really hard to take a picture of mittens while you’re wearing mittens because you refuse to remove the mittens. LOVE, LOVE, LOVE!!!

Finally…

Tea from knitika’s local tea shop (which I’m delighted she managed to turn into still being Pond-related!). I just finished 2 teas and am in dire need of a coffee intervention, so this will be just the incentive I need to switch back to tea!

Here’s the whole delightful, delicious, delectable, perfect, Pond-y package!

I adore everything and I feel so incredibly spoiled. Knitika did such a great job!!!!!!

FOs: House Stark Fingerless Mitts and Fifth Doctor Socks!

It's still not Friday (but it's kinda close) and these have been finished for two weeks now, but better late than never, right.

In my post about my resolutions for March, I alluded to these finished objects, so I should probably show them to you. Plus they're pretty awesome.

First: T.A.R.D.I.Socks by Anna Richardson (round 2)

It's really hard to photograph your own feet.

So... I mentioned above that this is round 2 of these particular socks. I also mentioned in my resolutions post that these socks resulted in a net gain of yarn. Here's the story.

You can first start here with the story of how I decided to knit myself knee-high socks for my Fifth Doctor (Doctor Who) costume even though I had never knit a single sock before in my life and previously had no desire to do so. So I knit myself knee high socks out of a cotton/bamboo/spandex blend yarn (because the costume was originally for summer) following a pattern that's lovely and beautifully charted, but presumes you've actually done some moderate amount of sock knitting and are using wool and know how to adjust socks to fit your feet. Needless to say, I was setting myself up for failure before I even started. So I knit them over the course of 6-weeks desperately trying to finish them in time for the convention I needed my costume for (the only time in my life I've ever knit more than one thing at a time. I will never do it again.), and I was pretty proud of myself. For one thing, I've heard many people who attempted these socks either don't finish or take forever to finish since there's a lot of purling and cabling and charting and they're REALLY LONG, so I was pretty impressed that I not only managed to make socks that look like socks, but that they were also socks that experienced sock knitters don't even finish. So I put them on for the convention and they were HUGE. Four inches too long, too big in the gusset, bunchy in my shoes and didn't stay up if I took more than 10 steps. So...they were socks, but they weren't socks that fit.

Fast forward to now. I needed to re-wear the costume for a Doctor Who panel at a convention in April, and I knew I needed to re-make the socks. I'd been trying to knit my way through the basic sock patterns in Wendy Johnson's Socks from the Toe Up book so that I could have some knowledge of how to make socks fit my feet, and I'd also knit the (still don't fit) butterfly knee-highs to try to figure out the calf sizing. Armed with this knowledge, I ripped out the socks (3.5 balls of RIDICULOUSLY SPLITTY YARN), re-wound, and started again with a modified pattern. I dropped a needle size so I didn't have to modify the width, but I took out a portion of the chart and recalculated the row count so I could shorten the socks and still keep the calf shaping. I managed to use about 55 fewer yards (50 fewer meters)/15 fewer grams of yarn this time, which is where the net gain came in. But the socks are the right height and fit better around my calf (though still not perfect, but I devised a solution with a ribbon that holds them up just fine) and I'm much happier with them. They are a bit of a slog though, so I can definitely see how people who don't need them for a specific purpose on a deadline would get tired of doing it. The only reason I made it through without quitting was that I knew I needed them for the costume.

In addition, this yarn is terrible. I won't mention what it is here (although you can see it if you look on my project page), but I don't think I'll ever knit with it again. I chose it because I wanted lighter weight and hopefully cooler socks to wear with the costume in the summer, but the cotton and bamboo don't have the memory to hold the socks up and the spandex makes the yarn INCREDIBLY splitty, making it very difficult to work with, especially when you're knitting and purling and cabling with yarnovers. I'm not impressed and it definitely wasn't fun to knit it twice.


Second: Game of Thrones House Stark Fingerless Mitts

These are for the Game of Thrones swap package I put together (which I'll tell you about as soon as a package actually arrives for me and I can do a sent/received post like I did for the Downton Abbey swap). These are my own design, modified from a very basic fingerless mitts pattern. I've done the same sigil on a hat and on an eReader case, so it was just a matter of modifying the stitch count and re-charting it. The grey main colour is Knit Picks Palette in Ash and the sigil colour is Knit Picks Imagination Hand-Painted in the Castle Walls colourway, which screamed Winterfell to me from the moment I saw it.

These were super quick and easy to knit up and my recipient loved them. I'm not really into fingerless mitts (I find them hugely impractical) but I'm thinking about modifying the other designs I have (Targaryen, Lannister, and Night's Watch) into the fingerless mitts too. Someday I'll write up the patterns for actual. I started writing up the hat pattern, but I never finished it. These are super fun and a great way to show your support for various houses. If you're interested, I sometimes list the hats (and may eventually list the eReaders and the fingerless mitts) on my Etsy page. Let me know.

Stash Enhancement: Doctor Who Yarns!

Shortly after arriving home from my summer of travel, which should probably also be known as the “summer of buy all the yarn while you’re on vacation”, I was browsing around LYS’s website (for some reason…probably they sent me an email) and saw that they had a new yarn in their "Nerd Alert Yarn" series. Many (most) of these are Doctor Who themed (because the staff at my LYS are my kind of people) and this one was no exception. They’d actually added quite a few new Doctor Who/Torchwood themed colourways to the series, but I knew there was only one of them that NEEDED to come home with me.

"A Centurion is Faithful 100%"

Now, since most of you don’t know me in real life and haven’t heard me gush for hours about how much I ADORED the Ponds (basically because that IS my relationship…I’m not making that up), you don’t know how much this yarn needed to come to me and be something amazing in my life, but trust me…there was no option.

One major problem is that I don’t knit socks. I don’t WANT to knit socks. Which means I needed to buy more than one skein so that I could potentially make something substantial that is NOT socks. So, before heading to the store I did a bit of research and queued up a few patterns that I thought I could manage with two skeins. All of them were sweaters, but they were short sleeved and should be feasible with the yardage of two skeins.

Then I went to the store, bent on buying this yarn and only this yarn, and the shop staff, being the terrible enablers they are, showed me ALL of the new Doctor Who yarns they had. Which led to me ALSO purchasing two skeins of Three Irish Girls Adorn Sock in the “Exterminate” colourway. And still feeling proud of myself because I only bought TWO yarns instead of all ten that Jeremy showed me!

Fortunately, I had a groupon, so I only paid about half as much as I would have, but when you keep saying you’re not going to purchase more yarn because you are out of room, buying four more skeins isn’t the way to accomplish things. Especially when you get home and have to literally CRAM these four skeins in your yarn drawers (meaning you’re somewhat damaging the skeins/labels every time you open the drawer). That, combined with the lingering thought that you might be moving soon and the idea that you will soon need a goodly sum of extra money (for various reasons) meant…

It’s time for a yarn intervention…

Stay tuned. There will be photos of my stash. All of it.

Finished Object: Fourth Doctor Scarf the Fourth

Near the beginning of August, just as I was thinking I was going to let the listing expire without getting an order to knit a Fourth Doctor scarf, another order came in. This one was my first overseas Etsy order (Germany!) and came with the (totally valid) request to change the purple colour I traditionally use from a less red purple to a more purple purple. Which is valid. The colour I use isn’t actually the best and I think I might like the purple I used for this scarf better. The buyer was lovely in looking on the Knit Picks site and picking out the colour she wanted and the whole process was very painless and yielded a lovely scarf.

Because I’m not the sort of person who likes having a ton of random scrap yarns around, I dug out all the Knit Picks WoTA worsted (fortunately I keep it all in one bag) from the previous full WoTA worsted scarf, took out my trusty yarn scale, weighed what I had, and then adjusted the ratio of how much to purchase.The one concern I had was that I had no idea how close KP matches colours between dye lots, as I was clearly using yarn I’d purchased a year ago and expected the dye lots to be drastically different. Good news…they weren’t. Even in the sections of the scarf where I *know* I joined a ball of the old colour to a ball of the new colour mid-section, I cannot even tell the slightest colour difference. I wouldn’t put 100% faith on this working all the time, but it worked out this time and I’ll probably take this gamble again.

The only real problem is that even though I made sure that when I ordered, the total amount of each colour I ended up with was greater than what was recommended on the pattern, but I still ran out of red, grey, and tan just before the end of the scarf. This put me a little bit behind schedule because I was on vacation when this happened and even though I ordered more yarn (from Ravelry destash and some from Knit Picks), I had to wait until I got back home to get to finishing the last quarter of the scarf. Fortunately, the buyer is a knitter as well, so they were very understanding about the slight delay and were perfectly lovely about everything, even when the package got stuck in customs in Berlin for a week and they had to call and take care of all of those problems.

Overall, this is the scarf I’m the most happy with since the first WoTA scarf  (which I got to see “in the wild” at the end of August, as I saw the person I made it for and she was wearing it. It’s wearing well and looked great even a year later!) I made, thus reinforcing my new policy of only making scarves in WoTA (or Cascade 220 if a person wants superwash) because it is the best yarn I’ve used for this process. Plus, because I have a new yarn scale and did a better job of monitoring how much yarn I had at the start and end, I have a WAY better estimate of how much of each colour I actually need for the scarf, so maybe the next time I open the listing up (might be a while…I knit this and then immediately knit a stockinette scarf in the round, so I have garter stitch burnout right now), I might not actually have to reorder yarn two times to get to the end.

Here’s a photo of the finished scarf. It’s pretty beautiful. Almost all credit to Knit Picks Wool of the Andes for being such a great yarn for this project.

4th Doctor Scarf 4 - Sport Weight Wool and the Glaring Imperfection

First…sorry this post is long overdue. Life, you know?

If you’ve been keeping up, you know about the great yarn saga of 2014 and all that went into the second of my “Two 4th Doctor scarves in two months” plan, so I won’t get into it too much. I will say that this was my first time using multiple yarn sources to make a scarf, and I don’t much like it.

Some thoughts:

• I still adore Knit Picks Wool of the Andes above all other yarns for this scarf. In the future (after this next custom order…I’ll get into that later) I think that I will explicitly state that all scarves will be made in Knit Picks Wool of the Andes worsted, Cascade 220 Superwash (yes, I’ll use it. I don’t like it as much, but I’ll use it since I know people want washable items), or Lion Brand Wool Ease (my favorite of all acrylics…though I just knitted up a swatch of Knit Picks Brava Sport and it’s certainly giving the Wool Ease a run for its money). I realize that some people have wool allergies and that Wool Ease won’t work for them and that I’m always harping on the need for people to be accommodating of allergies, but until I find a colour combo and a yarn combo that doesn’t make me want to never knit the scarf again, those people will just have to make do with those out there offering the scarf in acrylic (at frankly atrocious prices, if you ask me).


• Jamieson and Smith Shetland Double Knitting is the worst non Lion Brand Homespun yarn I’ve ever worked with. It’s scratchy and awful. I like to think that I can tolerate a fair amount of rustic scratchiness in my wool, and maybe it was just that it was VERY rough compared to all the other yarn sources, but every time I came to the brown colour I sort of cringed at the idea of having to knit with the Shetland. I didn’t like the feel of it in my hand while I was knitting it at all. I definitely don't think I'd knit something like a hat or a garment out of it. It knits up alright, but it was truly horrible to run my hand along.


• Absolutely no one in the world other than Knit Picks holds true to yardage in this scarf. I was using three yarns from Knit Picks WotA Sport (Thyme, Turmeric, and Currant). According to Knit Picks, there are 137 yards on a skein. I needed 195, 113, and 137 respectively, according to the pattern estimates. What I ended up using was a skein and roughly a half of the Thyme, slightly less than a skein in the Turmeric, and slightly more than a skein in the Currant. This, to me, is accurate, as the yardage is approximate and I’m not sure it includes tassels, plus my gauge didn’t exactly match the pattern gauge. In the other yarns…well…in the Dalegarn Falk, which I used for the grey, the pattern noted I would need 184 yards. I had 2 skeins, which totaled 232 yards and I had to cut the pattern short to ensure I had enough yarn for tassels. I know this is because Falk is measured in weight, not yards, but the pattern was in yards and matching this up was a challenge. To me, 48+ yards over what I was expecting to use is a little unacceptable, and I did have to leave rows off. That said, had I ordered a third skein, I would have had too much yarn left over. For the Jamieson Shetland DK, I also had to cut rows in order to make sure i had enough yarn for the tassels. The pattern called for 153 yards and I used 2 skeins, for a total of 164 yards. I ended up having to cut 8 total rows, and I was still a bit short on tasseling. This isn’t terrible and, again, if I had to order a third skein, I would have had way too much yarn, but it is disappointing to me. The worst offender, however, is the Rowan Pure Wool DK, which I used for the tan colour. According to the pattern, I needed 263 yards. I ordered 2 balls of this, which should have given me 274 yards. Cutting it close, but should have been ultimately fine. With 40 rows of tan still left in the scarf, I ran out of yarn. With my very rough estimate of 1.4 yards of yarn per row (that’s on the high end by a lot, I rounded significantly), this meant that I would need around 55 more yards of yarn. This meant that I used a rough total of 330 yards in a pattern that called for 263. I’m not sure if this is something with the pattern or something with Rowan really not getting their yardages correct on the labels, but it’s something to note if you’re going to undertake this project with this yarn in the future. I’ve been estimating total yardage needs for this scarf at between 1400 and 1500 total yards, whereas the pattern recommends a total of 1222 yards. My advice is to overestimate how much you need and figure on using about 1.4 - 1.5 yards of yarn per row of knitting.


• Mixed sources don’t knit up the same width. This should be obvious, and I was able to fix it with very careful blocking, but it’s not really something I’d like to have to do again. I’d rather I just use all one yarn source and have nice, crisp edges in the first place.


• I’m not going to talk any more about the orange/red problem and the Cascade 220, but it basically ruined what was an otherwise flawless scarf and I regret not holding out until I could get the yarn I actually wanted. The customer was disappointed (but understanding) and I was disappointed in myself. I will never again make this mistake.

Here are photos of the finished product, if you are interested.



 
I’m pretty much done doing these scarves for a while. I did promise this customer (because basically my executive decision to use this orange completely ruined a scarf that they ultimately otherwise loved), that after I get a break to recover and not hate these scarves and get some other projects done (and after the Knit Picks Saffron is back in stock at the end of April) that I would make them another one. I will let them custom it and they will order all the yarn to make sure it is what they want. And that will be the last mixed-source scarf I make. It may, in fact, be the last scarf I make for anyone who is not a close friend, and it will more than likely be the last scarf I make in 2014. I have a lot of projects I’d like to get done and if I keep making these scarves, I will never achieve even half of them. I don’t hate doing them, they’re easy, but they take time, and time is a thing that I don’t possess in great excess.

WIP: The second 4th Doctor Scarf, mixed yarn, Cascade 220, and the great yarn saga of 2014

Since I ended last evening just a few rows over halfway done with the second of the two 4th Doctor scarf commissions I’ve got, I thought I’d give you a WIP update.

This is the scarf I committed to making BEFORE the first one, but then some stuff happened and I didn’t understand how custom ordering and Etsy work and a few other things and someone ended up ordering one before I could take the listing down. Which brings me to where I am today…making TWO 3.5+ metre long scarves between the beginning of December and the middle of January. It’s not a hard pattern, and it’s definitely not work I mind doing, since I can (and have!) literally knit these without looking at them, while watching TV, in the dark while riding in a car, and with my eyes closed as I try not to fall asleep, but I have to admit that I’m getting a bit tired of it. Mostly because I have all these new designs bouncing about in my head and I really want to get to them. But deadlines! And I honour my commitments!

So, this is also the first of these I’ve made in sport weight (though I argue that Cascade 220 Superwash is basically sport weight yarn) and the first one I’ve made with mixed yarn sources. In fact, it’s pretty much the first thing I’ve ever made with mixed yarn sources. I just don’t like the unknown terror of matching gauges across brands and the paralysing thought that one section of this is going to be way bigger than another and it’s going to look weird and be really obvious and… I’d continue, but I think you’re going with this. My OCPD tends to make me a bit of a brand loyalist.
Story behind the mixed media on this scarf goes as follows: I hadn’t advertised that I could do this in sport weight (mostly because knitting things in non-worsted weight yarn never occurs to me, okay?), but when the customer asked if it was possible, I immediately said yes. After all, Knit Picks makes the Wool of the Andes in sport weight too. NBD, right? Wrong. On top of the fact that this was all happening immediately after Knit Picks had their mega-huge sale and were basically out of everything, it turns out that they don’t have *all* the same colours in sport weight as they do in worsted. Whoops. Thankfully, this customer is super amazing and we worked out a deal where I would order the colours I could get from Knit Picks (green, yellow, red, purple) and the customer would hunt down the rest of the colours we’d found (thanks yet again to the awesome resource of doctorwhoscarf.com). I charged less for shipping because the customer had to pay to get yarn shipped from three different places and less overall because my yarn cost was smaller, and then everything was happily worked out.

Except, of course, that it wasn’t.

When it came time to do the Knit Picks order, they were out of the WotA Sport in Saffron. So…I had no red yarn. Being resourceful, and having just learned that Cascade 220 Superwash is the right color, and is basically sport weight yarn, and also happens to actually come in sport weight, I headed to the internet (same place I had ordered all the C220S for the previous scarf). By this time, I was nearly done with previous scarf and ready to ship. I knew that in order to keep my deadlines I’d have to cast on the next one as soon as I started blocking the first one, so I was a bit tight on time, but I was still waiting for the other three colours to arrive from the customer so I figured I was alright. So…instead of just ordering the C220S in worsted (yarn that I knew would work out) I thought to myself, but what if it’s not the right size? I should order sport weight! So I did. And I even used my coupon code for free shipping that I’d earned for spending $95 on my previous order. Very proud of myself, I awaited the yarn’s arrival.

Arrive it did. Except…and I realize this is my fault, really, but seriously the point of calling the yarn 220 is that there are 220 yards on a hank…the sport weight apparently comes in 136.5 yard hanks and not 220 yard hanks. I didn’t even check this because, seriously, 220. Considering I had used pretty much an entire hank of 220S on the last project (despite the pattern saying I would need 175…I blame Cascade. Knit Picks never does this to me.), I knew I didn’t have enough. I thought about re-ordering, but paying the shipping the second time around when I should have just ordered the right amount of yarn in the first place when I got free shipping would have angered me.
So I took to the streets. I searched all the LYS that said they carried Cascade. None of them had it. One store supposedly had 8 balls of it somewhere, but no one could find it. I mean, it’s not that burnt orange is a totally regular colour, but it’s not that weird. I wasn’t asking for the odd yellow colour. Still, not a one to be found.

Next step…Ravelry. No one had the right colour in C220S. No one had the right colour in C220S sport. No one had the right colour in C220 sport. Finally, the only ball I was able to track down in the allegedly right colourway (I’ll get to that later) was a Cascade 220 regular worsted weight in non-superwash. Which I had never used before, but I made yet another assumption that if the superwash was basically sport weight, then of course the regular was basically sport weight. It isn’t. TBH it isn’t even light worsted. I don’t know exactly what happens between the regular yarn and the addition of the superwash chemicals, but it sure as hell shrinks that yarn down something fierce. So, now here I am (a week behind schedule) with one obviously larger weight yarn amidst all my sport weights. It gets worse. Despite the fact that the “burnt orange” colourway in C220S is a delightful red with just a hint of orange in it, this C220 I was sent in “burnt orange” is basically just orange yarn.
Here is the end result of my yarn saga:



Now, as I’ve never seen another ball of C220 “burnt orange” in real life, I don’t know for certain whether the yarn I was sent was the wrong colour (the person I ordered it from had lost the tag) or Cascade just uses 4000% different dyes for two yarns with the same colourway name. Suffice to say…I will never use C220 (non-superwash) for this again, at least not until I can get it in my hand and see what colour it is.

But! I was behind schedule and it’s not the *most* wrong I’d ever seen someone get the red bits (despite the fact that people seem to be ordering these from me because I do a bang-up job of getting the colours proper right) and I just wanted to get going.

After I got a quarter of the way into the scarf, I turned to my husband and said…I think I want to rip this out. I hate this orange.

He talked me down. For better or worse. To my customer. I sincerely apologise for this HORRID yarn. I figured on-time shipping was better than another two weeks of setback for something that to people who aren’t me is probably close enough.

So I persevered worked a few 8 hour knitting days that every muscle in my upper back is still screaming at past-me about, and am mostly back on track.



As I feared, the gauges are slightly different so the edges aren’t stick straight (I’m counting on fixing this in blocking). The tan is too saturated for my liking and there’s that damnable orange yarn, but it’s coming along nicely. I’ve learned that I really, truly do love Knit Picks above all else. Whenever I reach a Knit Picks colour I just sort of coo at the delightful way it slides on the needles, the way it feels in my hands, and the perfect amount of tension in the knitting. The other new yarns are okay (Tan is Rowan Pure Wool DK - I would use a lighter colour next time. Plus it’s superwash so it has that weird feel that I’m starting to learn is just a feature of superwash yarn. Brown is Jamieson Shetland Double Knitting and it’s very scratchy wool and I sort of hate it. Grey is Dalegarn. Which I’ve oddly never used before. It’s wool. It’s fine. I don’t find it remarkable for any reason. It does knit up a bit bigger than the other sport weights, though. More often than not it’s the grey sections — more even than the orange bits — that are wider than the others.

I’ll give you another update when I get this done, but it’s going well and I’m making progress and I’ll hopefully not have to push myself so hard that I’m in physical pain for days on end and maybe I’ll learn to accept the orange (doubtful). For now…it is what it is.

Cascade 220 Superwash and the Fourth Doctor

This is going to be a bit of a look-back post, as I’ve completed this project and shipped it out already, but I do want to document my thoughts regarding this new (to me) yarn.

Perhaps someday I will document the story of how I ended up promising to create two Doctor Who Season 12 4th Doctor scarves for two separate customers between the beginning of December and the end of January when I generally budget 4-6 weeks for each scarf, but I think that’s a post unto itself. Suffice to say, I’ve been knitting frantically at any available opportunity, and while I don’t mind making these scarves, as they are largely mindless work I can get done while watching telly or listening to podfic (or in the car, in the case of this superwash scarf), I don’t think I’ll be opening up the posting for a while. Sorry to those of you who may be waiting for one.

The second scarf I knit (back in August/September), I knit in Knit Picks Wool of the Andes in worsted weight and I absolutely fell in love with that yarn. It feels nice both pre- and post-blocking, it slides wonderfully on the needles, and it’s just generally a really fantastic wool to work with, especially for the price. So when it came time to list the scarves on my Etsy page, I thought I’d give people the option of having this knit in washable wool (planning on using Wool of the Andes superwash). Well, when an order came in for the scarf in superwash, I headed to the Knit Picks page and learned that Wool of the Andes superwash doesn’t come in all the colours I needed for the scarf, and I didn’t know the palettes well enough to figure out if I could get close enough. So, I had to ask the customer to pay a bit more for yarn (which I felt bad about, but he was very gracious) and I ordered the full color set in Cascade 220 Superwash (worsted weight).

The yarn came quickly, which is great because I was on a time crunch, and because I spent so much on yarn (the cost was $84), the shipping was free. Both positives, in my book. I was excited to work with the new yarn and see what it would knit up like and what the colour differences would be between the WotA scarf and the C220S (my new abbreviation system) scarf.



Here’s the new yarn. It’s a bit glossier than the WotA, at least on the skein. The green is very dark and the yellow and tan are often indistinguishable in certain lights. The biggest thing to note with this yarn is that while it is technically a worsted weight yarn, it’s a very light worsted weight, almost a DK. In fact, I have since ordered a skein of Cascade 220 superwash sport, and there is virtually no difference in yarn weight between the sport and the worsted, as far as I can tell.

As far as the yarn colorations go between the two brands, I do think the purple-red (marionberry in C220, currant in WotA) was far truer to the original show colors with the C220, but the green, yellow, and tan (Thyme, Turmeric, and Almond, respectively, in WotA) are definitely better in the Wool of the Andes colors.

As far as knitting up, I didn’t much like working with the C220S at first. It was very thin for worsted weight and it took me multiple swatches to get the gauge right (I usually knit very true to gauge). The superwash coating on the yarn makes it a bit slick so I found myself dropping stitches more easily than with the WotA. In addition, where the WotA seems to hold true to the yardages indicated in the pattern (using the pattern found on doctorwhoscarf.com), I either used far more yards than indicated on the pattern, or the balls are far fewer yards than they are supposed to be, as I actually ran out of green yarn before I reached the end of the pattern, and had to cut one of the sections short by a few rows. The pattern indicated that I would need 195 yards and the balls are supposed to be 220 yards. I also had just about enough yarn in grey, red, and purple (each with a 220 yard ball) when I was supposed to need 184, 177, and 137 yards, respectively. So either my gauge was completely off or something else went pretty wrong. I don’t think it would be worth ordering an extra ball of green in the future, as I was only off by 8 rows, but it is something that bothered me.

Blocking: This is my new nemesis when it comes to this yarn. It’s machine washable, so I debated just shoving it in a pillowcase and running it through a wash cycle, but I was worried about the yarn stretching oddly so I handwashed and pinned it instead. Turns out my first instinct would have yielded better results. The yarn opens up A LOT when blocked (it was significantly longer than the WotA scarf I made once it was blocked), which is fine, but my primary problem was that when I pinned my beautifully, consistently straight edges after handwashing the scarf, the rows shrunk up a bit horizontally as they dried and left the edges horribly uneven. I fixed it as best I could, but short of another re-blocking, this time with a run through the washer and a reshaping, nothing would fix the edges. So next time I either need to just let it shape itself and not pin the edges as it dries, or I need to pin it when it is less saturated with water and hope that makes the difference.

I’d definitely work with this yarn again, as it’s pretty much the best washable wool option in the correct colours that I can find, but if I have my choice I’d rather work with Wool of the Andes in worsted, as I think it produces a better product for less cost with less hassle.
Here is a photoset of the finished product in Cascade 220 Superwash. You can see the pulled edges from the blocking and hopefully this gives you a good idea of the colourations. I’m happy overall, except the blocking issue.