A change of direction - silk yarn

One of my 'evil' purchases at the Craft and Quilt expo was this gorgeous silk yarn

It has a wonderful sheen, is hand dyed and I particularly fell for the variegated... Anyone who is interested the yarn is by Alchemy but I warn you the price is not for the faint hearted - that was my "evil' part as I didn't strictly need it lol... However I think that I will easily get a dainty scarf per ball so that makes one or two for me and some great presents ready for Christmas :) - and there is my justification!

So while I have been resting from my weeding and quilting, I have been sitting watching TV and crocheting - which I have been unable to do for the last 2.5 years due to the vertigo and other forms of dizziness. I have to say it is wonderful to be getting full capacity back :). Although I've stayed optimistic and positive all the way through, its amazing to be able to do ordinary things without wondering what the repercussions will be. This will make you laugh - there was a period when I was having a brilliant day if I could wash my hair! lol and this period lasted months! Rofl! Isn't life amazing, have you noticed that often when we are given a challenge it leads to so many other benefits in the long run? Please let me know of your experiences :)

Ok back to the yarn.... I decided to do a simple grid pattern, its really easy simply chain stitch as long as you want the scarf to be wide (keeping it in multiples of your grid ie my grid is 3 so I chained 27) Then to start you need to chain an additional number of stitches to equal the length of a row stitch and the across (this will make sense in a minute)...then I decided to use a double treble stitch (which equals 4 chain stitches) to give some height to each row (here if you don't know the stitch), so the basic pattern is;
a. chain 4 (4 for the pretend db tr)
b. db tr  - repeat in every stitch across the chained run, for row one as a base.
c. chain 6 (4 for the pretend db tr and 2 normal) then
d. 1 db tr then 2 ch - repeat this step all the way across the row...
e. repeat steps c. and d. until the scarf is as long as you would like

For added interest you can add in solid patches like I have - once you've established the grid its easy - instead of the 2ch replace it with 2 db tr, I just di this by sight, some rows have none with some up to 3 depending on what felt right.

Hope this helps

and now its finished....

with a tiny amount of silk left over in case I decide it needs tassels of some sort...