New Pattern: Skipperling

Now available in my Ravelry, Etsy, and Craftsy pattern stores: a lace scarf called Skipperling.

Pattern: Skipperling, by Bonnie Sennott

Yarn: Sunshine Yarns Luxury Sock in the Lone Wolf colorway

Needles: US#4/3.50mm

A scarf for all seasons, Skipperling combines lace and twisted stitches in an elegant, feminine design that works equally well with jeans and a jacket or a little black dress. It's knit in fingering weight yarn in one piece, from end to end—no grafting required.

Skipperling's lace pattern has "action" rows on both right and wrong sides (i.e., yarn overs and decreases are worked on every row). So it's slightly more complex than a lace pattern where the wrong-side rows are "rest" rows of purl stitches. But even so, it's not technically difficult—I found it knit up really fast. I was motivated to watch the pattern develop because it was so pretty, even before blocking.

When someone commented on Facebook that the scarf-in-progress reminded them of butterflies, I was inspired to choose a butterfly-related name. I discovered there's a whole subfamily of butterflies named Skipperling, and I was delighted that one of them, the Many-spotted Skipperling, is even brown like the scarf and has spots like yarn overs.

If you'd like some company knitting Skipperling, come on over to the Ravelry Blue Peninsula group, where we're having a Neckwear KAL in September. If you don't want to make Skipperling, you can choose another of my patterns—we'll be knitting cowls, scarves, and shawls all month long. I'm still putting together all the details, but at this point I do know the prizes are going to be awesome—including two skeins of Luxury Sock from Sunshine Yarns! The KAL will start September 1 and end September 30.

Thanks go to Jenny for tech editing, and to everybody in the Blue Peninsula group who expressed interest in this pattern as I was knitting it. Your support and enthusiasm mean a lot!

Thank you very much for reading.