Laume's Studio

Here's what I've been working on lately and what I'm using as my efforts for the last couple of days of Thing-a-Day.


What you see in this not-very-clear photo is a very pretty skein of gray angora yarn and a pair of double ended needles with knitting that wraps around and around. It will, hopefully, knock on wood, if I've done it properly, be a moebius scarf/cowl.

I thought it would be super easy. Just cast on a bunch of stitches onto circular needles and then twist them once before connecting them into a ring. WRONG! I had to do a bunch of net surfing and reading before I understood why that wouldn't work. Because it creates a 360 degree twist and what I wanted to make was only a 180 degree twist. After more reading and heaving thinking (the hardest part, oh my old brain hurts!), I decided I was as unconfused as I was likely to get and I started the project. This blog post was very helpful because it provided a few step-by-step photos and this site was helpful because it gave the most detailed instructions. There may be many more helpful sites out there, but that's as far as I got before picking up my needles with not a small amount of trepidation.

The yellow you see in the photo are the stitches I cast on. They are not a permanent part of the scarf. When the scarf is completed, the yellow stitches will be snipped or pulled out. The oddest part of this whole project is that there is no front and back, no SIDES, and you knit it from the inside out to the the edges. After the first round of gray stitches, I had to knit the second round into the bottom of the first round, intead of the top round that are looped around the needle already, and then leave that first round on the needles while picking up a new round of stitches, doubling how many stitches I have on the needles and coiling the needles around each other in two loops. Confused yet? If that made no sense to you, don't worry, it didn't make sense to me the first half dozen times I tried to understand it either.

The first several rounds were really hard to maneuver. It's getting a bit easier now that I've gone round for a bit and there's some stretch between the two coils. The scariest thing about this project is that you don't get to see it unwrapped and working until it's done and cast off the needles. So I'm knitting this on BLIND FAITH. Ack! I sure hope I'm doing this correctly!