Weekly Photo Challenge: Blue

Blue is my favourite colour so this blog brings together many of my favourite things: the colour blue, blogging,  photography and knitting.

Here are a few of my knitted items, all in blue.

Starting from the top left and going clockwise: loop scarf, lace slant hat, long scarf, spiral scarf, work in progress.

I like to make myself at least one new scarf each winter and this loop scarf was the one I made at the beginning of the most recent winter (2011-12). I was at the store looking for yarn for a different knitting project when this yarn caught my eye, it was the colour that got my attention. The pattern for this particular scarf was on the collar around the Patons Fab Big yarn, I needed to buy a pair of larger needles to work it, and I was very excited the moment I laid eyes on it. The pattern itself seemed at first glance simple enough, but I must’ve started then undone it at least 30 times. The Patons Fab Big Loop Scarf pattern says to “alternately K1, P1, work 1 yarn-over before each stitch. On all following rows work the stitches as they appear and a yarn-over before each stitch, let the yarn-overs of previous row slide off the needle”. As I said it took several goes before I got this right but I love the result.

Soon after I arrived in London, over three and a half years ago now, a friend gave me a couple of small balls of blue yarn and a loan of a pair of knitting needles. I had taught myself lace knitting a couple of years earlier and I also needed a hat as I wasn’t yet used to the cold I felt in the UK compared with Australia. I probably spent a good half-day trawling the internet for a pattern that was relatively easy but wouldn’t look like it was so easy that I could’ve completed it in my sleep. So the first ever hat that I made was the Lace Slant Hat as seen on the Ravelry website (login required).

After completing the Lace Slant Hat I had just a little of that plain blue yarn left over and I felt like it wanted to be made into a scarf but there was nowhere near enough of it to become a scarf. It was also around this time that I was off traveling again. Somewhat oddly, it was while staying with a friend in Prague, Czech Republic, when we took a day trip to Dresden, Germany, and we were wandering through a department store looking for an acceptably clean public toilet to take her then four year-old daughter to, that I picked up the multi-shaded blue to make the rest of the scarf with. I didn’t have a lot of money with me and didn’t have a lot of space for souvenir balls of knitting yarn so I only got two skeins. This scarf was another one that was begun over and over again as I experimented with the width of the project that would finish up being an appropriate length for a scarf. I think I ended up going too narrow but the result was a fabulously long budget scarf.

Early this year my mum had seen a spiral scarf that I was knitting in red so she immediately sent me some blue striped yarn thinking it would look good in the same pattern. She was right. This spiral scarf pattern was first seen in a knitting extra booklet attached to an Australian Better Homes and Gardens magazine from sometime during the Australian winter of 2009.

I’m actually having second thoughts about my current project, still on the knitting needle in the picture above. It will eventually be a Simple Lace Top as seen in the Creative Knitting Magazine from May 2009. I love the look of the lace design and it actually is quite simple to knit. I think though that I’ve chosen yarn that I’m going to feel too warm wearing, which is why I’m currently having second thoughts about it. I think I’ll continue with the project but at present I’m not entirely sure that it will end up being the top that it was destined to be.

What do you think? Should I persist and complete the top, or undo it before I get any further and knit the yarn into something else entirely?