Believe it or not, I haven’t stopped knitting during the last few months.  I was making a few scarves for dear friends of ours and couldn’t post about it because they occasionally peek in on the blog and I didn’t want to ruin the surprise.

As usually happens when I give away something I knit, I manage to do so before I get the usual pictures of it to post on the blog.  Since I’m a full-time worker bee, full-time parent, and only part time knitter and blogger, these things get a bit of a short shrift.

Anyway.  Anne and Susan are two friends who I love for many reasons, not the least of which is that I now have someone in Denver to go see all the Sci-Fi/Fantasty/totally geeky movies that I love and Eric detests.  Eric will rarely go see any of these films with me and when he does, he’s one of those types that keeps asking questions like, “Why is that pointy curly thing sticking out of his head?” which just drives me up the wall.

So over the summer, we went to see the new Harry Potter movie and loved it.  At drinks afterward, I casually asked, “What house would you be in?” Susan immediately replied, “Ravenclaw!” I raised a quizzical eyebrow to Anne, who tilted her head towards Susan and said, “I’d be in whatever house she was in,” which was just incredibly sweet.  Now that I knew which house they were in, I could set off on making them house scarves.

The scarves in the movies vary from Year 1-2 and Years 3+, so I thought I’d make one of each and then they could decide which one they wanted to wear.  Also, then they wouldn’t have matching scarves, which is a bit too geeky even for me.  Ravenclaw house colors differ from the book (bronze/blue) to the movie (silver/blue), so I chose the book colors out of a sense of authenticity to the source material.  Yes, I do realize I’m talking about Harry Potter here.

My unwilling model for the Year 1-2 scarf.

And my lovely sister models the year 3+ scarf.

Pattern: Hogwarts Scarves (rav link)

Yarn: Cascade 220 colors 9449 and 7823

Size 7 needles

They’re knit as big tubes so they have no wrong side and are doubly warm.  The color switching was a bit fiddly for the second scarf, but I finally figured out the best technique, which was to add in the yellow, knit with the jogless jog method in the round while carrying the yellow along with the center blue stripe, shifting the row over one stitch at each color change to make each stripe 3 stitches high, and then break the yellow after the stripe bundle was done.  I combined this with the method of knitting in the end as you go along, which meant a lot less work at the end.  Here’s another great example where I meant to get good tutorial pictures and just never managed to.  Here is a link to the technique I used.

Anne and Susan were finally gifted the scarves on New Year’s Eve, and loved them as much as I hoped they would.  These were relatively simple, technique-wise, to knit but did take up a fair bit of time.  It feels sort of odd to have them finished, to tell the truth.  I always knew I had these to work on and now that they’re done, I’ll have to pick up a new project.  It’s sort of like that feeling that Eric mentions to me when he finishes a marathon–exhilarating but disappointing at the same time because once it’s over it’s sort of like, well, what’s next?