The Fibonacci Scarf

I have a sock knitting machine. Items that would take me hours and hours to knit at my slow hand knitting speed take mere hours on the circular sock machine (CSM). So it was a few days before Christmas and I of course had more knitting to do than time. So instead of the partially knit hand knit scarf that I was knitting for my son-in-law I decided to knit a scarf on the CSM. What the CSM does really well is knit tubes – plain boring tubes. What could I do to jazz up that long scarf tube? My son-in- law is an engineer and so I thought that I would do a stripe pattern in the Fibonacci sequence of numbers. I’ve read about sweaters knit with this sequence (see the blog knitorious for instance and look at her 2006 projects) but didn’t know what it was. But luckily for me (for many reasons) I’m married to a mathematician and I was able to ask him to explain it to me. Being a great teacher he didn’t just tell me the sequence but told me the formula to figure it out myself (teach someone to fish and he’ll never go hungry). Why am I telling you all this? Nature loves the Fibonacci sequence and it produces the golden ratio. So it’s something to think about when designing. Here’s how to figure it out yourself. Add the two previous numbers. That’s it. So It’s 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 etc. Thus was born the Fibonacci scarf. I made it in Packer colors because my son in law is a Packer fan. When my daughter called to tell me that they got the package I asked if Eric liked the scarf and she said yes. But he had to look up what the Fibonacci sequence was.

Hee, hee. Got you Eric!

By the way I do know how to knit socks on my machine. Socks are just tubes with heels and toes added. I’ll show you some other day.