Superbowl Scarf

What's that?  A Superbowl scarf on a Canadian knitting blog?  LOL!  Yes!

My sister in law lives in Indianapolis, the city that is hosting the Superbowl this year.  For Christmas of 2010 she sent me a scarf kit from the Super Scarves program.  Basically, the week before Superbowl, Indianapolis is having a winter festival.  They've done a lot of changes to the downtown, and estimated they needed 8000 volunteers.  To make the volunteers easily recognized, they would each get a handcrafted blue and white scarf.  With 11 days to go before Superbowl (or before the festival, not sure which), they have received over 13 000 scarves.  And mine was one of them!

The yarn in my kit was awesome.  Alpaca with a Twist is from Indiana, and I'm assuming created this yarn just for this project, as the yarn is called "Touch Down".  It's 60% fine highland Wool, 20% Bamboo, and 20% FS Alpaca.  Soft, slight sheen, nice twist, it would lend itself to any number of designs.   At first, I thought I could use it on the standard gauge machine as it looked to be about a DK weight.  However, the gauge on the label says 4.5st on 5mm.  I really thought that seemed a little loose, although this was for a scarf, and the yarn would probably bloom nicely.  In  the end, I decided to do it on my SK155, which, co-incidentally, I bought on Superbowl Sunday last year (had to go to several bank machines just to be able to get enough money out--never had that happen before!).  On the site's website they also listed other yarns and the official colours they would accept, and I have to say, I think this yarn was the nicest out of the list!

I tried out some punchcard designs, but it wouldn't make a long enough scarf.  I still couldn't get the tuck function to work, so unless I wanted to hand manipulate 6 ft of patterning, I needed to go with stripes.  I just realized from another project that I could have done vertical stripes using the slip stitch function!  Oh well.  I opted for a diagonal stripe of two rows each colour.  I did this by decreasing on one edge while increasing on the other edge.  I hoped this would tame the curl.  Along with steam, it did a decent job.

The scarf wasn't quite how I wanted it to be in the end, but I will admit to leaving this project to the last minute (they had to be in by the end of November 2011 so they could be sent to the women's prison to get labels handsewn on).  But it's still a lovely, warm scarf, and I hope the receiver appreciates it and enjoys their memento of Indianapolis's chance to host the Superbowl.