Red #2-#6

Red, as a colour, has a lot of things associated with it. Whole holidays, seasons, emotions, etc. And it's so tough to photograph!

I wrote way back in February about wanting to take part in a challenge to knit scarves for World AIDS Day. When Mary Anne posted the next scarf in the challenge, it was too much of a ...challenge. Then I don't know what happened.  I'm pretty sure she has not posted as many patterns as she was going to. I sort of put it aside and thought it's too late. Then there was an article in the paper, and we have until Nov 23 to hand them in, I think. I took a look at my red yarn and got to work. A nice little diversion from custom Christmas orders.

There are three different yarns used.  The second from the left is the one I did last February.  It's a very fine red yarn. The one on the left is made with ten rows a red slubby cotton (what I made my red Waterfall in), and two rows of the fine red, all in rib (92gr). The second from the right is Bramwell 4 ply, left over from a scarf (but was a left over to begin with LOL) (106gr). I talk more about its pattern in a minute.  The right most is straight up red slub in a rib (81gr).

 So.  This one was an accident.  I started out using the Bramwell and two strands of the thin red.  It had some issues so I restarted several times, the fourth time using one strand fine red.  However, I noticed after I had done a few repeats that I had not changed the settings correctly after the cast on and I was knitting it in some sort of bizarre rib.

It was knitting both beds one direction, and the main bed on the return trip. Whatever. I didn't really care by this point. It looked cool, it was laying almost flat, it was working out, both sides were nice. Etc. Time to move on!

 I got out the red slub and cranked out a plain ribbed one quite quickly.  After washing, I was a little disappointed with the red slub as it went a bit fuzzy.  Should've dried it longer in the dryer but I didn't want it to shrink. The one on the left is similar to the mistake one above, except that this time I did the ribbing correctly. In the basement, the two yarns looked much closer in colour, but outside? The red slub is not magenta like it's showing on my screen, but there was still quite a difference!

 I don't know which one this was...I think the Bramwell one (above).

 Four fat scarf sausages!

 I swear that red slub was not magenta.
When I went to drop them off, she told me at the yarn store that she is selling Bernat "Satin" at cost, in red only, to those making the scarves.  So I bought three more skeins. I had hoped it would be one skein per scarf, but I ended up needing almost 1 1/2 per scarf.

 I made the right one first. I started with a racking design but I didn't have the manual handy and I left needles out of work on the mainbed, which wasn't needed. I ended up making a big mistake so took it off and thought it out a bit more. The pattern still isn't quite symmetrical, but it's nice. The other side reads as stockinette, but if you stretch it out, you can sort of see the ribbed stitches.
The one on the left is the tuck lace rib design in the SK155 manual. T2 for both these, on the SK155 (all the scarves were on the SK155 except the original one from the winter, it was on the Memo-matic 327).  Both of these needed quite a bit of steaming.  There is a somewhat big error on the tuck one, right in the middle, I did 4 rows of plain  knitting instead of two. It's not that big of error, I suppose, many would never notice. But I did. We're not perfect.  No one is. 

Yarn In:  300gr + 6523gr = 6823gr

Yarn Out:  590gr + 5195gr = 5785gr
Balance:  1038gr more BROUGHT IN than used
Costs:   $6.75 + $220.79 = $227.54 /306 days = $0.74/day