FO: The Loki Scarf

This is it! The long-awaited post that will enable every one of you with a basic foundation of knitting and willingness to try out stranded colorwork to knit your very own Loki Scarf! And I bet approximately none of you will replicate my efforts because the way I did this is stupidly insane. It works. But it’s insane.

This, my friends, is approximately six feet of laceweight yarn worked in a combination of stranded colorwork and intarsia. The chart I created, which is available here, and is completely free, is based on a twelve-stitch repeat.

I worked six repeats across, and added ten stitches to each side for the border, so I cast on a total of 93 stitches. Ten stitches were worked with what I’ll call the C color, then I worked the chart repeats, twisting the working C yarn with the working yarn for the chart repeat (if this doesn’t make any sense, brush up on your intarsia skills). Knit the chart, then twisted the last working yarn with the other ball of C yarn for the other band. You’ll have a total of four balls of yarn going, but you’ll only be working with two at any time. Work the chart three times, then work seventeen rows of C (you can drop one of the balls from the edge and just work with one strand of C), then work the chart until you’re about three inches from the desired length. Work seventeen rows of C again, work three more repeats of the chart, purl one RS row, knit one WS row, take a couple of shots of your liquor of choice, and then do all of that again. If you really like yourself, you’ll start mattress stitching the sides as you go—knit a few repeats, seam up the sides, keep on knitting.

That’s right. You want this scarf to be double-sided? The easiest way I could come up with (and granted, my brain was not entirely connected to my body at this time) is to knit a scarf twice as long as the finished piece.

I totally cheated and used the fringe to close the gap between the cast-on and bind-off edges, as I couldn’t even begin to fathom seaming anything if it wasn’t completely necessary. I trimmed the fringe to about three inches at each end, so I’m pretty sure this scarf clocked in at over six and a half feet by the time it was done. The yarn, which is 100% cotton, stretched out a little bit while it was blocking, and is amazingly not too heavy.

I want to knit a scarf with this pattern and these colors for myself, but I’m thinking it will probably be a sport weight wool version, and double-sided, which traditionally means the colors are inverted between the sides, but it sounds so much more delightful than knitting twice the scarf.

And as I was waiting to post this until I had super awesome action shots…

That’s Jessi in her awesome Black Widow costume taking on Adam as Loki. And here’s a close up of the scarf.

Many thanks to Adam for sharing the photos, and for rocking the hell out of this scarf, and for not telling people at DragonCon that I’d knit scarves for them.

Questions about the construction of the scarf? Need more clarification? Want to offer me heaps of praise (don’t do that, you’ll only encourage the madness)? Comment below!