The Snowman's Scarf

The photo shows the snowman's scarf underway. I discovered the fancy Marnie Ritter stitches I wanted to use were too big in scale for them to show up in the narrow, long space of the scarf. What to do?

Obviously, this is a job for Superman!

Well, actually, Chottie Alderson came to the rescue. Not in person but I've always admired the late Ms. Alderson's design sense, creativity, and sense of humor. (Her website of chottie.com seems to be down right now or I'd show off some of her fabulous designs.) She's the one who said if it isn't fun, it isn't needlepoint. Words of wisdom to live by! One of her most famous inventions is the Chottie Plaid which is what the scarf is being stitched with.

It's basically a plaid based on skip tent and a series of numbers. I choose the number sequence of 5-3-7-1 for my plaid and I'm using four colors--lime green, light rose, blue and bright red. I stitched a purple and yellow glasses case with a monogram in the center based on the birthday of the lady I was making it for once. You can use any number sequence you want (your phone number, your street address number, etc.) but since I had a limited space I only used four colors and a series of four small numbers.

If you look at the photo, you'll see the two-part scarf is stitched but the left end closest to the snowman's face looks denser than the right end. That's because the right side is only half finished but the short end of the scarf on the left is done.

I started at the top of the long end of the scarf and did five rows of skip tent in my light rose color (5-3-7-1, remember?). The next three rows of skip tent were in red, then I did seven rows of skip tent in lime green, followed by one row of blue, which ended the first sequence. Starting over at 5 again, I did another five rows of light rose. I worked the scarf all the way to the bottom doing my skip tent according to my pattern of 5-3-7-1 in the light rose-red-lime green-blue colors. You don't have to use four numbers and four colors (you can use 5 numbers and only two colors, or really anything you want).

The second step to finish Chottie's Plaid is to turn the canvas 90 degrees so that the scarf is at the bottom and the tip of the carrot nose of the snowman points down. Now, using the same number sequence and colors, do reverse skip tent stitch in the empty thread intersections. This makes the plaid denser and is a lot of fun because it is when you actually see what plaid pattern you have created looks like. Remember, I started with 5 rows of my light rose, then switched to three rows of red. Because the scarf is narrow, that's really all the reversed skip tent I could do.

I could stop at this point because right now it looks as if the smaller end of the scarf nearest the face is in shadow. This is a good way to shade scarves, in fact. I'm not going stop here, but remember this the next time you have a flowing scarf that is partly in light and partly in shadow. Today I hope to reverse skip tent the longer end of the scarf so that you see my plaid creation in full.

This isn't the only way to stitch plaids and I'm not 100% certain that another lady didn't come up with something similar about the same time, but Chottie gets the credit for a fun way to create a mystery plaid.

Thanks, Chottie, wherever you are!

Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow