fishie’s aquarium

My roommate and I have made a stashbusting pact. Once we have both met our goals, which we have verbally declared to one another, we are going 50-50 on a Webs Grab-Bag. And after finishing a sweater made out of lace-weight, I have been churning out projects like no tomorrow and am actually knitting down some stash.

I have a soft-spot for Tuesday Morning yarn. It’s always cheap, and sometimes it’s actually good. I’ve had some Queensland Collection Bengali for a couple years now that I have not done anything with because it was just too cool to use. That kind of thinking never bought anybody a grab bag, so I’ve started using it up. Case in point of the type of thinking that is helping me stash bust: December 23rd. I think to myself, “You know, you should probably make your mom a new scarf.” I did make her a scarf back in the day when I was a fairly new knitter and had no idea what I was doing. It was nice from what I remember, and you couldn’t even tell all the stitches were twisted because I used two kinds of acrylic held together. On the 23rd, I was looking at my drawer of Queensland Collection, and realized that one of the colors I had three 88-yard balls of (perfect scarf yardage) was in her favorite colors.

I scanned Ravelry for quick and simple scarves, but I didn’t see anything I liked. I pulled out a stitch dictionary, found something cool, and the rest was history. I finished the scarf in two days, despite being gifted Portal and getting 3/4 of the way through the game on the 24th. I named the pattern Striata after my zebra loaches (Botia striata–yes, I’m a fish nerd. Why do you ask?) because of the striping effect of the slipped stitches and because of how the colors ended up striping. I had a bit of yarn left over and decided to do some fringe, which I normally think is quite tacky but in this case decided it was necessary to use 100% of the yarn.

Download Striata for Free

The pattern is both written out and charted, and easily adaptable for any weight of yarn. The chart reflects my using aran weight yarn, but the written directions will accommodate any stitch count that is a multiple of 6. The slipped stitches add an interesting texture, as well as making this a VERY fast project.
Ravelry page is here.

Stay tuned and I might actually make a real blog post!