Mountain Laurel Tips

On this page you’ll find tips and tutorials that will help you make your own Mountain Laurel scarf/shawl! I cover the following topics:

Yarn + Color Combo Options

This scarf is worked by double-stranding fingering-weight yarn and working on a US 8 needle. To create the colorful marled affect, a pack of mini skeins is used along with a full “main color” skein – each section of the scarf is created by double-stranding the main color with 1 of the mini skeins (and then switching to a different mini skein in the next section). For example, in my sample I used Manos del Uruguay Fino in the Tea Leaves color for my main color, and then my pack of mini skeins was Mano’s Fino Mini-Skein Set, in the Flora colorway pack:

If you plan to also use this concept (of a main color + mini skein set), I recommend reading this blog post where I discuss how to plot your colors. Alternatively, if you don’t want to double-strand, you can consider using worsted-weight instead – either in 5 different colors or you can choose just 1 or 2 too!

Double-Standing

Are you new to double-stranding? If so, check out this tutorial page which includes a video tutorial on double-stranding techniques.

Construction

This scarf/shawl is created by starting with a small number of stitches and then growing it out. Since I know it can be helpful to see the overall shape beforehand, the image below shows how the scarf looks flat and where it starts and where it ends:

So as you can see above, it you decide to use stash yarn and you don’t have enough to finish all of the sections, you can just end the shawl early and it just will come out smaller.

How you wear your Mountain Laurel

With a scarf like Mountain Laurel, there’s lots of different ways you can wear it. Here are my 3 favorite ways:

A kerchief around your neck
A shawl wrapped around your shoulders
Tie it like a scarf and wear on your shoulder

Technique Tutorials:

Below are tutorials for the techniques used in Mountain Laurel:

Long tail cast-on
Long-tail cast-on
k2tog (knit 2 together)
kfb (knit front & back)
YO (yarn-over)