Knitting the Sky

I don’t have a lot of time these days to work on personal projects, but I’ve started one that I just couldn’t pass up: a sky scarf, a conceptual knitting project from Lea Redmond.

It’s a beautiful concept with such a simple execution: start with yarn in a variety of shades of gray and blue.

It took some looking–the sky out here comes in so many different shades…including a lot of shades of gray!–but I finally found the variety of colors I was looking for with Lion Brand Yarn’s Vanna’s Choice (although some of the colorways are Vanna’s Choice Baby):

Bottom Row (l-r): 100 White, 405 Silver Heather, 149 Silver Gray, 151 Charcoal, 404 Dark Gray
Middle Row (l-r): 106 Little Boy Blue, 108 Bluebell, 108 Dusty Blue
Top Row (l-r): 105 Silver Blue, 102 Aqua

Then, each day, check out the sky, choose the closest color of yarn, and knit a row in your scarf. At the end of the year, you have a scarf that is also a memento of your year.

I’m making a few changes to the original pattern. I’m not a big scarf wearer–I prefer cowls and I do already have a scarf I like–so I’ve decided I’m going to turn this into a wall-hanging, to remember our time stationed in the Pacific Northwest. Knitting every row wouldn’t work for that, because with garter stitch only half of the rows are clearly visible on either side. I also wanted to add some colorwork; sometimes the sky is too complicated for one color. But plain stockinette wouldn’t work either, since that would curl. So I decided upon 1×1 rib, which will look like stockinette without the curl.

I’m 3 days in…

Day 1, January 1st, was gray but not raining, and not too dark.

Day 2, January 2nd, was dark, dark, dark…and rainy.

Day 3, January 3rd, featured dismally colorful skies, and couldn’t decide between blue sky and rain.

3 rows down and, since it’s a leap year, 363 rows to go.

If you’d like to keep track of my Pacific Northwest 2012 Sky Scarf, I’ll be posting daily pictures in my Twitter feed, on my Facebook page, in a Flickr set, on my Google + page, and on a Pinterest board (although, annoyingly, Pinterest appears to be refusing to show half the photos)…so hopefully it will be convenient no matter what social media you prefer!