Lostings and Findings

Happy birthday Hubby!  Love you!

Looked through my pattern books last night and found several nifty things.  One was the baby dinosaur and egg pattern I made for Sehlat many moons ago from Knit-a-saurus, a book full of dinosaur patterns.  Looks like it's out of print.  I borrowed a copy from the Guildford library back in 1996-ish, and snagged this one in the yarn store a few months ago.  Another thing I found was a simple lace scarf I could make with Hempathy.  It's a Seaman's scarf, two lace panels joined by a plain section around the neck.  I like the design, the pattern is clear, there's just one problem: no yarn requirements.

The pattern comes from Stahman's Shawls and Scarves by Myrna Stahman, a book full of top-down Faroese lace shawls and matching Seaman's scarves.  You swatch in your lace pattern, work out the yarn requirement, and away you go.  This is fine if you already have yarn waiting.  How much yarn do you need for a lace scarf?  How long is a piece of string?  Twice as long as half its length, true but unhelpful.

The scarf I picked was "Matthew" which Stahman designed in memory of Matthew Shepard, the gay student beaten to death in 1998.  The pattern is a leafy design that flows up the scarf, and it is available online.  That version gives you yarn requirements, which works out to three skeins of hempathy.  Now I just have to pick a colour and finish the Koigu scarf.

While searching, I found something I've been looking for a long time onlline: a live copy of the Double Helix seaman's scarf pattern by June Oshiro, including the PDF of the chart.  This pattern vanished from it's original location a while ago, and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine hadn't picked up the chart (it's been archiving my junk since 2000, go figure).  I've seen one of these knitted up, and it's impressive, perfect for your biology geeks like plaid_dragon.  Lesson learned, save the pattern when you see it, next time you might not be so lucky.