I have a confession to make. I’m really into Harry Potter. Luckily, I’m not alone. The difference is that I am a bit older than most of the fans. What can I say? I have a youthful side, and Harry Potter really appeals to me. At it’s heart, the stories are filled with really beautiful relationships of people who genuinely care about each other. I love that. I love the interesting creatures. I love the magical landscape J. K. Rowling paints in her amazing books. I think the world needs more of this kind of story telling.

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The iconic item we all think about when we think of Hogwarts are the House Scarves. They have a specific look and specific colors represent a specific House. It’s similar to team colors, if you will.

The only problem with making the “authentic” Hogwarts scarf is the amount of time it takes to make one. It’s a double knit scarf on size 6 or smaller needles. The scarf is approximately 8ft long!!

When I read the Ravelry boards, the big thing EVERYONE talks about is how long it takes to make one. Honestly, it’s really something for machine knitting, not hand knits. But, who has a machine to knit the tubes? People will talk about taking a YEAR or more to finish their scarf. I admire the dedication.

I started experimenting with House scarves after Christmas. I was knitting the scarves I’m sharing here during the Harry Potter movie marathon they run every year right after the holiday. They were fun to make, so I made them a couple of different ways. The big garter stitch scarf was a 15 hour or so project, which is more like a two weekend project. This smaller seed stitch scarf was like a 12 hour project.

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We got socked in two weeks in a row with heavy snow. This is SO unusual for Virginia Beach. We just never used to see weather like this. Inconvenient for living your life, but awesome for taking pictures! I’m lucky to have a photogenic dog that loves to model and have a nice backyard to create the photographs.

So we took a ton of Harry Potter inspired pictures the past couple of weeks. Fun for Willie’s blog and for this one as well.

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I got so many cute pictures of Willie wearing my Harry Potter inpired scarves. They are the test scarves I made to figure out the final design, and still so cute in the winter setting.

There was just something about all that falling snow that screamed Harry Potter to me.

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I will be publishing the final designs into patterns. I’m working on getting that together now. I think having an easy to follow, fun pattern for a beginner is a great thing. The future of knitting depends on attracting younger people to the craft. So, creating designs that young people will enjoy knitting and be proud to wear is important to the long term survival of our craft. They are pretty simple as far as the knitting part goes, so I am going to put a lot of emphasis on the finishing of the pieces. People don’t seem to want to do that part of it, but good finishing creates a beautiful finished object.

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Good finishing is what takes an item from Home Made to Hand Crafted.

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I’m going to be perfectly honest with you. I tried to take the easy way out with the scarves and just carry the contrasting color up the side instead of cutting and weaving ends. I tried it to see how it would come out, and I think the super bulky yarn really demands weaving, not carrying. I was shown a way to reduce some of the time, so that helped. However with bulky yarn, it really requires an extra step to secure the ends.

The devil is in the details as they say. It does add some time to properly weave the ends and secure them, and to block a project. But this is what elevates the quality of an item and what makes your knitting truly stand out, and stand out for the right reasons.

Today’s post are the first scarves I made when I was still testing the yarns and figuring out how far I wanted to go with the finishing. For the final scarf, I went with totally different fiber. I also did the right thing and cut the yarn and wove it in for each color change. I blocked for 3 full days on blocking wires to get crisp edges. And yes. It was totally worth doing. I’ll share that one in an upcomong post. Today, enjoy my cute dog in my test knits. Stay warm everybody!