After giving away 2 scarves, totaling 156,400 stitches and 9+ months of work, and finishing the Mantle of Fierce Majesty, I decided it was time, finally, to make a scarf for myself. To invest that much time, however, I knew it needed to be something I truly loved. And though many fandoms could claim that devotion, there is one that holds that absolute #1 spot for me…. and that is Harry Potter

I started reading the first book in college because I “wanted to know what all the fuss was about”- famous last words. I can vividly remember reading the first paragraph of a library copy of the Sorcerer’s Stone in my dorm loft, putting the book down briefly, looking out ahead of me and saying, to no one but myself, “Wow, this is going to be good!”. There’s nothing that remarkable about that first paragraph except the style, the comforting feel. It’s hard to describe, but for me JK Rowling’s writing is so easy and fluid that I immediately felt pulled in…. it felt like home. Oh boy, I as yet had no idea the extent of the amazing world I was getting into but I’m SO glad I did.

So I knew that was it, no question. I wanted to make an epic Harry Potter Scarf and I wanted it to be something beautiful, through which I could physically carry the story with me. But there was no pattern like that on Ravelry and while Frivolite Handcrafts has a breathtaking Doctor Who Scarf which is definitely on my to-do list, no one had a Harry Potter double-knitted scarf similar to what I envisioned in my head… So what do you do when you have a idea germinating in your psyche and you suddenly have a realization that you actually possess the skills needed to make it a reality? You pack your mental bags, sketch yourself a map and head out the metaphorical door to see where it takes you. And Oh! what a long and winding road it was, chock full of trial and error!

Printing “knitting graph paper” from TheKnittingSite.com, and sitting with a notebook, scratch paper and mechanical pencils, I started brainstorming symbols, design and logistics and I worked on the pattern on and off for about two months in the Fall of 2016.

I’m a List-o-phile and so the first thing I did was to start listing physical objects that were unique to each book. The more I thought about it the more I wanted my scarf to follow the stories in chronological order, like “There and Back Again” did. But I also liked the idea of a larger “statement piece” somewhere on the scarf that would catch the eye and definitively represent a huge part of the story at a glance…. What, I may ask, is more representative than Hogwarts itself? And what single word instantly unites Potterites around the world and bring tears to every eye if not “Always…..”?

I learned so much through this process, especially what NOT to do. I inadvertently added in 3 totally unnecessary, tedious, and neck-cramp-inducing steps that I would never do again. Feel free to follow along on this winding road map:

1- I came up with the list of items, then did some very basic outline sketches of them.

2- I started drawing them on the graph paper in no particular order. I’d play around with size and shape and thickness and angles of lines.

3-Once I had my basic designs, I cut out around the individual shapes….

4- Then I positioned them on fresh graph paper to see what I wanted their arrangements to be and how they would flow. I planned to make my design the same width of stitches as the two Frivolite-designed scarves, since I knew that those dimensions worked well.  I also planned to use the same weight of yarn and size needles so that I limited my unknowns when it came to final size and gauge. Once I had a decent layout I taped them down and then…

5- I painstakingly transferred them to new graph paper by hand by layering a blank graph on top of each sheet, shining a light from underneath my glass coffee table and coloring in the appropriate boxes. I now had a basic workable pattern for myself but I knew it wasn’t in a form that could be uploaded and used by others. I tried to find a software program that would scan my sheets and generate a better chart/ pdf because I was convinced that transferring it all to Excel by hand would be horrendous! Amazingly I found no miracle program specifically designed to read my ridiculous hand drawn charts and polish and publish them into perfect pdfs :-P… at least if there was one I could not afford it.

6- I finally caved and decided to try transferring a couple of the designs into Excel just to see how bad it would be and…. Holy Moley that was easy! There was a lot to transfer but it wasn’t difficult at all! Once it was in the spreadsheet I could also move things around easily and add or erase squares with a click.

Geez, I wish I’d tried Excel from the start! I will never, ever do steps 3-5 ever again!

And I kept tweaking things little by little. I’d originally intended to make my scarf the same 850 rows as the Frivolite patterns but I soon realized there was a lot of empty, unnecessary space in my pattern so I scrunched the details closer together (thank you Excel!!) and whittled them down to a very conservative 750 rows 😉 This turned out to be fortuitous because I also ran into some logistical changes with yarn and gauge from participating in the 2016 Arkansas Yarn Crawl. While at a LYS in the Northwestern part of the state I found and bought some Araucania Nuble wool/silk yarn in the perfect colors (Warm and Gold). However, as often happens, I got so distracted with the many various, beautiful yarns that I didn’t realize until I got home that I had bought fingering weight instead of lace. This would change needle size, finished scarf size (if I had left my scarf at 850 rows it may have ended up being ridiculously long) and, most importantly, I now didn’t have enough for the scarf because the Nuble had a lower yardage count. (All because I got distracted in a yarn shop- ain’t that the truth!)

I was worried about mismatched dye lots if I bought elsewhere but the shop was 3 hours away and didn’t have an online store. Thank Google I was able to find the right colors online at the Yarn Barn in San Antonio  and the assistant responded instantly to me on Facebook and actually checked dye lots for me (customer service props!) and surprisingly the red dye lots matched! And while the golds were different I never could tell, so kudos to Araucania for consistent dying! 🙂

I also slightly altered some of the later designs after I started knitting, before I got to that page of the chart. But after a certain time I had to make myself lock everything in because I would just continue to double guess my designs.

Thus I began my monumental knitting quest…. luxuriating in the gluttony of going up to size 1 needles instead of 0’s!  Ooo la la! I felt like I was knitting with broom handles 😉