It feels funny to finish a cozy wool scarf in May, but the colours definitely feel like they suit the season! I bring you my double-knit paintbox scarf, made using the most perfect rainbow gradient I’ve ever encountered.
If you’re not a knitter (and I get the impression that a lot of knitters don’t even venture into this realm) you might not know what double knitting means. I didn’t either, prior to starting this scarf! Luckily my best friend’s mother happens to be Lucy Neatby, and she showed me the basics of double knitting before I got going on this project. Basically what you’re doing is knitting two pieces of fabric at the same time, and tacking it together strategically within the rows but also at the edges of the scarf (this happens by having yarn cross over between sides or by twisting the two strands together at the edge). This makes a double-sided project, so there is no right side or wrong side, and each side is the inverse of the other. When you change to the other colour, that colour switches places from the near side to the far side and vice versa (although I’ve heard you can do designs that aren’t exact inverses but that’s beyond my knowledge). This makes it great for using a variegated yarn, because the colour changes continue at the same rate the entire length of the scarf.
This pattern was great as a beginner to the technique, and is called the Paintbox Scarf. The pattern is very easy to memorize and I didn’t have to refer back to the pattern pages at all once I got going. I actually started this project on my trip to Finland/Iceland in the summer of 2018, and the reason it progressed so slowly is not because it’s hard/slow to knit, but because until quarantine I was only knitting it when I travelled. It makes a really great bus/train/plane project because it’s so repetitive and easy to jump into with a few minutes or a lot of minutes to yourself. You can see its beginnings in this post if you scroll down to my ferry trip.
The pattern uses purl stitches to emphasize the little blocks with a raised up contrasting texture, which wasn’t hard to manage at all. The funny thing about double knitting is that the way it’s done, it actually makes little pockets inside the squares where the fabrics are not attached together. Lucy actually uses this quality in another of her double knitting scarf patterns to have you insert little bits of stuffing inside as you go to make puffy bubbles!
You may be wondering what yarn this is. It’s actually the same yarn used in the sample on the pattern website, made by Kauni. The rainbow one can be found here and the solid here, although they’re both currently out of stock. I have the exact same yarn because in the past I’ve helped Lucy very sporadically at her home office when Craft Cruises came into town and visited her house, and she paid me in yarn/patterns! My next knitting project in the queue is a result of that trading system as well.
My next knitting project is another double knitting project, and I’m hoping to get the swatch done for it soon so I can get started on the real thing! It’s this hat, and I’m going to be using a different variegated yarn plus a dark background instead of the light one featured in the sample photographs. After all that one-colour knitting on my cardigan and then more solid colours on the cowl, I had a lot of fun with the rainbow gradient and am excited to use another variegated yarn right away!