52 Pickup pattern up for sale on Ravelry

It’s been about 7 months since I started this project. Much of the pattern had already been designed even then, but I couldn’t release the pattern until I had a sample — and the sample was going to take months to make. Consider that I have a day-job, and given my weekly time constraints I was able to get a single card repeat (one of 18) done each week. If I’d been able to work on it non-stop, it would have taken 4.5 months to finish. But also consider that my book came out in October — so I was working on this project at the same time as I was finalizing my book. I also had several other projects going at the same time, some of which have had progress made on them and some of which have not. So it’s taken more than 4.5 months to finish it.

This is made from Regia 4-ply; I was really hoping to get through it with 3 skeins of white and 2 skeins each of red and black. But I ran out of black and white within a few repeats of the end, so that hope was dashed. The red I ran out of less than 10 rows from the end — so in the end it’s 4 skeins of white and 3 skeins each of red and black — but there’s still plenty left of all three (especially the red). It turns out that there’s less red than black in the scarf, and I was at a loss to understand why, since the backs of the cards are almost exactly equal in all 3 colors, and there are the same number of red and black cards. But someone astutely observed that the hearts and diamonds don’t take up as many stitches as the clubs and spades. Of course! It’s so obvious once someone figures it out.

But you’re probably interested in knowing where to get yourself one. I’m willing to take on knitting another one for the right person who can afford a high 4-figure price for it, but until that person comes along you’re just going to have to knit it yourself. I’ve put it up for sale on Ravelry at $14. I know it’s a high price for a pattern, but it’s 115 pages long and I’ve already told you how long it took me to make it. Rest assured, you don’t need all 115 pages in any given project, and you only need to print off 3 at a time. There is no plan to make this available in print form — it’s just too long as a single pattern to be distributed any way other than digitally.