Mermaid Sorbet

This little gem, which ended up being almost 12 feet long, has been neglected for a week or two because I didn't want to block it. Actually, I had no place to block it due to its enormous, ridiculous size, because blocking on the floor is a no-go with a cat and a toddler. I ended up blocking it in halves on the bed, but I'm not entirely happy with the stitch definition and, when summer classes wind down in two weeks, I'm going to block again.

I really like this tutorial from the purl bee, particularly the part about blocking on a towel that isn't "too linty." It's like they've actually seen my linen closet. . .

Mermaid Sorbet: A Use for Otherwise Unusable Yarn

About a month ago I dyed this yarn with Easter egg dye. The yarn is Knit Picks Bare superwash in fingering (sock) weight, and I used four of the color tablets - red/pink, blue, yellow, and purple - to get a sense of what the colors would look like. The yarn looks gorgeous all wound up like this, but because I didn't make a longer skein for longer color repeats, it will not stripe if I knit it into socks and would probably be a horrible, variegated mess.

My solution: dropped stitches. I'm using the Seafoam pattern from Vogue Knitting: The Ultimate Knitting Book and size 5 circulars (40 inches). I am calling this scarf Mermaid Sorbet because of the colors and the pattern, but I inadvertantly cast on 666 stitches (I needed a multiple of 10 + 6), so I toyed with the idea of calling this project Devilfish.


I've completed two pattern repeats, each repeat being 8 rows, and I think I'll have enough yardage to do two more repeats. As bright and crazy as this yarn is, I really like the longer pieces of color I see because of the multiple yarn overs. In my humble opinion, a dropped-stitch pattern or one with multiple yarn overs seems an ideal way to show off a colorful yarn that doesn't seem suited to many other projects.