Landscape scarves

With many remnant and single balls of wool remaining from other projects, I decided to make some horizontal scarves. Having sorted the wool by related colours this gave me varied tones and textures, and I added a small amount of a contrast colour for interest. I used 6mm circular needles, 170 stitches and worked one or two rows of each colour, until the scarf was about 15cm wide, leaving approx 15cm for a fringe each end. I worked in 8ply (DK) but also used double 5ply and added boucle for texture and variety. The best results were using a limited colour scheme for each scarf.

Used to make many of these scarves when I owned an Australian Made craft shop at The Rocks in Sydney (Australian Horizon) using many decorative yarns and embellishing the fringes with beads, but these scarves are more practical for charity knitting but still colourful and decorative. The burgundy scarf was knitted in moss stitch but I found this was too slow so used garter stitch for the other scarves.

The finished result reminded me of some of my landscape paintings. When composing a landscape I look for the horizontal lines that define the forms of the landscape such as roads, paddocks, lines of trees and distant hills. These are suggested by varying the tone but keeping the colour harmonious and related. The effect is also reminiscent of the strata of the sandstone cliffs in the Blue Mountains that have influenced some of my paintings. I have added sections of paintings as examples of landscape lines.

Inspiration can come from many sources...