Cable scarf

I had made several scarves a while back, but they were all a bit smaller than my husband needed to keep him cozy while walking to work. I saw this as a good opportunity to make a project from my new pattern book, 1-2-3 Skein Crochet.

I chose the Man's Hat and Scarf pattern - though I skipped the hat part. Here's a scan of part of the photo in the book.



The pattern for the scarf called for 3 skeins of Red Heart Soft, medium weight yarn; 2 in Black, 1 in Toast. What I had was 4 skeins of Bernat Alpaca Natural Blends, 2 in Forest, 2 in Fern. I did stick with the 5.5mm hook recommended, even though the alpaca was a bulky (5) yarn. Using this yarn, the pattern did require all 4 balls of yarn.

The finished scarf curled around itself quite a lot and did require blocking. Here is one end of the finished scarf.



I'm quite happy with it.

There was, however, one problem with the instructions.

The scarf is done in pairs of rows, with the cables made in a row of sc, followed by a row of dc. With the foundation chain and first row of sc counted as row 1, that means each even number row is a dc row. The problem was in row 17, which reads:

ch 3, dc in each sc across.

This is row 17, outlined in red.



As you can see in the photo, row 17 is clearly another cable row. Row 16, meanwhile, is a dc row, not an sc row.

So I ignored the instructions for that row and did a cable row, which you can see marked in red here.



Then I did the last two rows as instructed.

The only other thing I changed was one of the finished ends. Only the short ends get finished with some sc, as the long sides don't need any finishing at all. The instructions were to finish off the yarn, then re-attach it to a corner for the edging. I prefer to avoid cutting and re-attaching yarn, so when I finished the last row, I turned the corner and did the row of sc as otherwise instructed. Then I re-attached at the other end, as instructed.

My husband really likes the scarf, though he's disappointed that I blocked it. He kinda liked how it curled around itself. We'll see how he likes it, now that it's flat. :-D