Eskimimi Knits knitting blog

Squoffle

Squoffle is a short buttoned scarf, made with a single skein of bulky/chunky weight yarn. Though it is a very easy pattern every sixth row makes a departure from the established garter stitch to add a row of interest with knitted eyelets, some of which are later utilised as button holes (an additional boon to those who do not enjoy making buttonholes, of course!)

Buttons for security and style

This scarf lays completely flat with no curling, so whether you choose to block your finished piece or not is a matter of personal choice, not necessity.

The name Squoffle comes courtesy of my other half, who phoned me whilst I was travelling to say he had picked up something special for tea.  As he poured through descriptions of gorgeous starters and a sumptuous main course and what wine we might enjoy, I of course only had ears for what was to be for dessert.  Looking at the packaging, he said over the phone in a confused voice ‘Squoffle?’  A Small tear in the cardboard had partially obscured the ‘o’ of ’soufflé’, and so the word squoffle was born.

I like to think of the squoffle as meaning a ’squishy waffle’ and with it’s frothy texture and grid of eyelets, it’s a name that seemed to suit this little scarf quite well.

Download the PDf for Squoffle

Oubliette, from the French ‘oublier’, to forget.

In the immortal words of Hoggle from The Labyrinth:

An Oubliette is a place you put people to forget about them.

I have an oubliette, not for casting away annoying people that have done me wrong, but for projects that just never came to be, for whatever reason.  It’s not so much a dark and distant dungeon which I can walk away from to such a distance as to not hear the piteous sobs of what lies within, but a small cylindrical box that resides on my desk.

It's a place I put knitting, to forget about it.

As long as items are concealed within I do not feel guilty about their unfinished state.  ’Out of sight, out of mind’ works just fine as far as I am concerned, but today I decided it was time to open up the oubliette and find what UFOs (unfinished objects) still resided within, and if they could be completed, salvaged, or if the yarn could be re-imagined in any way.

To be fair to myself I am a pretty monogamous knitter.  Every now and then I will have to lay aside a complex piece of knitting, such as the Red Admiral I am working on, because I have a knitting deadline to meet (the current one being Christmas – how did that creep on on me?), but under normal circumstances I only have one project ‘on the needles’ at any one time.

Despite this I found a few things inside:

'you came back for us?'

There’s the leg motif of the Pine Tree socks I was knitting for my brother-in-law, the rest of which I had ripped out to make some mitts for my mother (but I couldn’t bare to unravel the tree motif for some reason, and I found I had enough yarn to complete the mittens without doing so).  There is also a half-finished hot-water bottle cover I was making out of pink cotton as comfort knitting when my Grandad passed away, and which I couldn’t bring myself to later complete as it somehow brought back the feelings of sadness I experienced as I knit when his death was imminent.  I have decided to unravel the pink cotton and make a few fun and frivolous things for Christmas, to repurpose the yarn into small but cute things for a few of my siblings, to make the yarn into something happier.

Also in the oubliette were a few knitted sunflowers I had made from old yarn scraps that I didn’t want to throw away as waste, so I am going to have a think about how I can use those as embellishments on a project.  Hoggle would be proud.