Published via Ecency

@merenludick pinching his dad's Oogilieboo.

I have been blessed with three completely different children, all with different personalities and needs. Both @matthew-williams and @aimeludick chose scarves they could snuggle around the house,

But Meren asked if I could knit him a school scarf. His school colours being navy - which will make up most of the scarf and then a larger white stripe and a slightly smaller yellow stripe. I chose wool of different thicknesses and bought thinner needles, but It's been quite a steep learning curve!

I Thought it would be an easy task but then became quite overwhelmed as I discovered that his school does not have an official scarf at all! How crazy is that? I just imagine Meren on his long journey to school and hw cold he must get. He travels far longer than the other two kids and it includes an bus ride. I completely understand his request for a school scarf. However, after looking at the uniform website, I realized I had possibly promised something I couldn't deliver.

However, after a phone call to the office, and Meren went to check too, I was given the parameters for an acceptable scarf and so the work began!

Since there's no official scarf, we have to go by the socks, the tie, and the jersey as guidelines and hope for the best.

Most of it will be navy but its the two stripes at the beginning and the end of the scarf that are doing my head in.

Firstly, when you change colours, it always leaves a hem line which I was hoping to keep to one side, which would then be the inside of the scarf. By the time I got to the end of the 1st stripe and converted back to thick needles (which was a real battle) I realized the hem was on the wrong side. I am not going through that again: well I will for at least three more times, so I decided to leave it as is. I thought the hem would work f I was expecting a " down stitch" for the next row, but it looks like I'll have to plan for an "up stitch," to keep the hem lines on the same side. It looks like, with my conversion to yellow for the second stripe, I've managed to get the hem on the right side by knitting on an "up" row.

The other very important thing to remember, is when cutting off the wool you want to change, to leave it long enough to be able to tie a good sturdy knot. I did not do this which made it extremely difficult to tie the two ends, the old "thin" wool to the new "Thick" wool. In fact regardless of the colour, one needs to leave enough space for colour change knots so that you don't struggle to tie a knot at the end connecting the two strands together.

So the school colours are navy, with a white and yellow stripe, the white stipe comes 1st and is slightly wider than the yellow strip. The rest of the scarf is navy, so that's a relief.

But, I've had to learn to switch needles and wool types, from thick to thin and then back to thick again which has been a serious learning curve. The white and yellow wool I chose is far too thin for the big needles so I had to transfer onto the thinner needles, which, to start, was easy enough. The process is much the same when converting back to the wider wool and needles, but this time, the stitches were super tight which made it hard to knit for the first few rows! My nails have been horribly damaged my the removal of acrylic nails and they just break under pressure. I even used a pair if plyers so help me to get the stitches to o down the next needle. I did learn that taking it one stitch at a time when moving, is the key, rather than trying to move a whole bunch at once.