Anna Bright Design

I finished this scarf at the weekend, just in time for the weather to start to turn cooler. It’s made from Windy Valley Pure Qiviut, which is possibly most divine yarn ever produced.

If you haven’t already come across it, Qiviut is the soft underhair of the arctic muskox. It is reputed to be eight times warmer than wool and softer than cashmere. I was lucky enough to receive a ball of it a couple of Christmases ago and it really is sublime. It is also scarily expensive!

It’s the kind of yarn that doesn’t come one’s way very often, the sort that really, really needs to be touched to be believed. If clouds were warm and dry, or if candy floss was not sticky, this is how the yarn would feel. It is so soft that it feels like nothing in your hands, as though someone has merely breathed warm air between your fingers. I tried to capture the soft haze of it in the picture below:

I started the scarf last winter, got half way, got distracted by another project, and picked it up again a couple of weeks ago. I had knitted both borders, left one on some spare yarn and was in the process of knitting the lace centre panel. When I picked it up again I realised that I couldn’t remember what the pattern was, but the lace was simple enough to figure out from what I’d already knitted, so I just carried on anyway.

When I came to write this post I realised that I still couldn’t remember the pattern. I spent ages trawling through lace scarf patterns on Ravelry before remembering that that is exactly what I’d done in the first place, and that in the end I’d used a couple of stitch patterns from Knitted Lace of Estonia  by Nancy Bush.

The border is a 10-stitch pattern, starting from the outside edge and working in to the middle. Because I wanted to use every scrap of yarn, I knitted both borders first and then worked on the centre.

The centre panel is called ‘ladybug’ lace. It is a 6-stitch pattern; I worked 10 repeats plus a 3-stitch garter stich edging on each side.

The scarf is not large – it’s more of a neckwarmer really, but such a warm and soft neckwarmer that I can’t wait for the weather to be cold enough to wear it!

Steve has already requested a manly version for Christmas, so I’m going to try and find a non-lacey lace-weight pattern for him.