Winter is Coming Scarf

June 2014

This scarf tends to either leave people slightly non-plussed or make them squeal with excitement, depending on how familiar they are with the work of James R.R. Martin. My husband is a huge fan, and this was his Father's Day present this year.

There are several Game of Thrones inspired knitting patterns, including this one which is was initially tempted by. But looking at official merchandise - including my husband's house Stark t-shirt with this motto and a dire wolf head on it - I thought that this version was closer in spirit to the real thing.

This was my first attempt at double knitting, but as I seem to say every time I try a new knitting technique, it's not as difficult as it looks. It is pretty time consuming, because you tend to have to knit and purl alternate stitches the entire time. Still, with something as small as a scarf I could live with that. The only slightly fiddly part was making sure the cast-on, cast-off and edging were neat, and there are some great resources for that. 

• cast on - here;
• edging - here; and 
• cast off - here.

Although this pattern was written for a worsted weight yarn, my version was done with 4-ply. It came out JUST long enough, but a very nice width. I also modified it by tweaking the chart slightly so that all the letters in "inter" and "oming" were the same height. It would have bugged me otherwise.

The other thing worth knowing about double-knitting is that the two sides of the fabric are like positive and negative images of each other. This means that if the motif includes writing, it will only read correctly on one side, and be reversed on the other. Somehow it is possible to make it read correctly on both sides, as has been done with the other Winter is Coming scarf I linked to, but as far as I know noone has adapted this chart like that as yet. 

Now all I need to do it make him a pair of these for Christmas.

I'm a little bit tempted by these double knit projects too: one ring scarf, corvus scarf and chugga-chugga.

Pattern: Winter is Coming Scarf by Julie Chen
Yarn: Regia Color 4-ply / King Cole Zig Zag
Colour: Grey / Cream
Amount: 2 skeins of grey, one of cream
On ravelry: here