Knit a Scarf with Bold Circles

I had kind of stopped sharing scarf knitting patterns for the summer, even though our Southern Hemisphere friends can still use them, but I will make an exception for this one, which I think maybe everyone should knit right now, regardless of the season where they live.

The Shanta Wrap from Pascuali Designs features big, bold circles on a contrasting background. The project is worked in garter stitch and uses the intarsia technique to make the color changes.

This one calls for sport weight yarn to make a shawl that measures 15 inches/38.1 cm wide and 60 inches or 152.4 cm wide. That’s already pretty big but you could try it with DK weight to make more of a shawl, or even with fingering weight to make a narrower scarf.

The main thing is that you really need two colors that contrast highly to make those circles pop. The designer uses their own Pascuali Suave yarn (available in Germany), which is a cotton yarn, though this would be great in wool for a warmer finish (and again if you want to make it wider to be a shawl, wool or alpaca would be a great choice).

You can find this project, which is available in English and German, on Ravelry.

If you’ve never done intarsia before it can be a little intimidating, but the good news is that this scarf uses large color sections and it doesn’t look like you would ever need more than three balls of yarn for a row. (With intarsia each block of color uses its own ball so you don’t carry the unused yarn across the back.)

If you need help with your intarsia technique, I wrote a post over on Our Daily Craft that covers the basics. It shows intarsia worked on a stockinette stitch with three balls of yarn, but the idea is the same when working with a garter stitch.

[Photo: Pascuali Designs]

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Faux Intarsia

Not too long ago I did a test knit for another designer that was for a cabled cardigan. It’s really cozy and nice but it just about broke me in a ton of different ways. I couldn’t get gauge, which I suppose is my own problem, but mainly I was somehow both bored and forced to pay attention at the same time.

Because it used the same cable all over, I always had to know what row I was on, but nine out of ten of those rows, nothing in particular was going on. So I couldn’t stop paying attention, but what I needed to attend to was boring.

It may have ruined me for knitting cabled sweaters, but maybe I just need something that’s more engaging. Like this Modern Aran Cardigan pattern from Lion Brand Yarn.

This is a reworking of an old pattern from their archives, and you can tell that form the classic look of the cables and the oversized feel (nothing cropped about this one!). It has allover cables, but like a classic Aran sweater it’s not the same cable, so you’ll have to pay attention to what row you’re on and what cable turns happen for which cables on that row.

Because of this, it’s considered an intermediate knitting pattern, but if you’re comfortable working from multiple charts at once it shouldn’t be a problem for you. There are three different charts and seven different cable moves.

Also because the pattern is so big and boxy there are only two sizes available, with a finished chest measurement of either 49 or 63 inches (that’s 124.5 or 160 cm). It’s up to you to decide how much ease you would like and whether that will work for your body.

The pattern uses worsted weight yarn (and calls for another classic, Lion Brand Fisherman’s Wool). It calls for six buttons and includes pockets to make it extra cozy.

This one looks like a great winter project to make and to wear if you’re up for a bit of a challenge. You can grab the free pattern or buy a kit with the yarn needed direct from Lion Brand Yarn.

[Photo: Lion Brand Yarn]

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