I think scarves make wonderful gifts; not only as a matter of personal preference, they often prove to be useful in the coming cold months. This year I made two, one of which is incredibly impractical, and one that turned out surprisingly nicely.
Both are very simple, particularly as I have an irrational fear of knitting patterns (something to do with all the intimidating abbreviations that I usually don’t understand).
This post about Christmas gifts is rather last minute, but I also ended up knitting these gifts last minute as well, just in the past few days.
Rabbit pattern scarf
For one of my cousins, I thought I would try to make something a bit more interesting. I used four balls of relatively thick wool—it was a bit tight with the background colour, but I had plenty of the other three remaining.
My design did have plenty of flaws though; as I ran the wool along the backside of the scarf, I had to choose between either having a puckered scarf, from pulling the excess wool too tight, or knitting very loosely, which resulted in a very messily knitted scarf.
In addition, as you can see below, flat areas, like the top of the rabbit’s head, are only held together by strings of excess wool, thanks to the two different colours.
This is the basic rabbit face design. For a chemistry metaphor, you can consider it a monomer that can be repeated as many times as you like to create a full polymer (scarf). I pieced together seven (each face took me around 20 minutes, but mostly as I kept making mistakes) with seven rows of background colour between each.
I found it very useful to mark which rows are knit and which are purl (as the pattern has an odd number of rows, you will always begin with the same stitch) to keep track of my place.
It turned out messily, and considering the scratchiness of the wool, not something I would consider wearing that often. I suppose I could call it a novelty scarf in that case.
Infinity scarf
I based this off this “pattern” (but really more of a guide) except I substituted a different stitch. I found that knitting together the ends of the scarf into a circle with the tail of the cast off end was clever and worked well. To knit this scarf as a circle would take a very long pair of circle needles.
The stitch I used (I’m afraid I don’t know the name) is pretty loose and is useful for making a longer scarf with less wool. It is the same as a knitting stitch except you loop the yarn around both needles once before pulling the yarn through and knitting the stitch.
I think I might end up borrowing this one occasionally.