Travelling scarf spoiler

So as promised, here are some pictures of the first travelling scarf that has passed through my hands. I'm really pleased with the section that I knitted up for it and it was so much fun to try out a new stitch. I'm not a huge fan of knitting swatches as it always feels like it is eating into time when I could be doing some real knitting but I am a big believer in the process. You have to knit swatches to try things out. Doing these travelling scarves is kind of an ultimate swatch method for me as it feels like each little section is like knitting a swatch- it's about the same size and I get to try out new stitches but it's not pointless. It's going on to make something beautiful and useful and best of all, I can maintain my enthusiasm without any effort. I always find that no matter how excited I am about starting a project the swatch knitting bit beforehand always gets me down. But not with this- it's great!

This is the scarf so far. I'm only the second person to have it hence it's so short. The first section is double moss stitch and my section which is in the slightly lighter grey is a mock cable stitch from volume 1 of the Vogue stitchonary series. It's the first time I'd tried it and after spending some time puzzling out the instructions (vogue always seems to be using another language to me) it turned out to be easy as pie. I will def be using this one again at some point.

Grey yarn is a real pig to photograph though! The final picture should hopefully give you some idea of how the mock cable is constructed but it basically comes from knitting into a stitch three down the left hand needle, then the first (which would be the next stitch normally), then the second and then dropping all three off of the left had needle at the same time. In essence all you are doing is creating a really long stitch over the top to make it look at though there is a twist there. Sneaky clever- I love it!