Anyway, this is a pretty simple double-knit scarf. The sides are just reversed colors, so one side is mostly gold with maroon stripes & a maroon Gryffindor lion, and the other side is maroon with the same accent designs done in gold. The idea for the checkers at the bottom and the chart for the lion was taken from Ann Kingston's Harry Potter Bookscarves, and I just kind of estimated everything else as I went along. A scarf's length is supposed to be about the same as your height, and my niece is probably a smidge over 4' tall, so that was my goal length.I'm about two-thirds of the way done now. I spent an hour this morning trying to chart a design for the other end. I worked on a picture of the "sorting hat", tried out a Harry Potter logo, and thought about possibly doing either the barn owl, a magic wand, or a cauldron, but nothing looked terribly great. The problem is mostly that I'm working on a width of only 15 stitches, which doesn't leave a lot of room for designs to have very much detail, and all my charts just turned out like oddly-shaped blobs. So I think I'm just going to go with a monogram on the opposite end. I am taking the general shape of the letters from the charts in Mandy Chronister's "Potter Alphabet Chart", but I'm modifying them to be slightly longer and not as wide so they'll fit sideways in about the same amount of room as the lion takes up. It should work fine, and what kid doesn't like something that was personalized just for them?
Since I've borrowed most of the interesting elements for this scarf from other sources, I won't be making a pattern for it, but if you would like to recreate it, you can download the charts from the two sources I linked to, and know that my scarf is 34 sts wide (so, 17 sts for each color) which, on worsted weight yarn, gives me a width of about 4.5".
If you're not well-versed in double-knitting, never fear! I just recorded two videos today which show you how to do a 2-stranded cast-on and how to work the stitches for stockinette stitch double knitting. My goal is to have them posted in the next couple days, which would still give you plenty of time to make this scarf for the Harry Potter lover in your life!
Oh my gosh, if she doesn't love this, I will beat her over the head with a wet noodle! (ok, not really), but I DO love it! You are so, so very clever, and this was way cooler than the basic striped version I saw in my head when I mentioned the idea to you. You will get many Cool Aunt points in your column for this one!
ReplyDeleteGlad you like it! It was fun to make and good double-knitting practice. It was actually quite a relaxing knit as I didn't really have to design much of anything to do it!
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