Knitting the Long Bacon scarf
for those who don't get the joke: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/long-bacon-store
Near the beginning of 2025, I, mir, decided that as part of my newfound hobby of knitting i would make the cute scarf from the meme. I walked to the local yarn store, gave a vague description of the project to yarn lady, and she pointed me towards the Encore Mega shelf. the yarn itself is thick and airy, soft with a little bit of scratch. Compositionally, it's 75% Acrylic and 25% Wool. I got the five colors necessary - dark purple, violet, white, orange dark yellow, and red - and some appropriately sized needles, and got to work.
my first attempt used 5 knit stitches of each color, in a row, and came out rather flat. The problem was that it kept trying to curl in on itself, so the red and purple stripes ended up on the back. also, said back was a cavernous expanse of purls and seams. I still have this one, so i took a picture of it:
Figure 1: Cell phone photograph of the back of my first attempt at the long bacon scarf, described above
Some very brief research claimed that ribbing would help, so i tried ribbing the second-to-last stitch on each edge. I got pretty far with this design, almost to my own height in length. I started ribbing the fourth-to-last stitch too. but it didn't help much, and if anything made the center fold back more because of the added weight of the edges. also, the whole thing was just really wide. it was a good learning experience, but not a real project to be proud of, except in the way that i was proud to be past it.
So i started over. Four stitches instead of five, 1x1 ribbing to completely even out the curl of stockinette and make a nice smooth Long Bacon.
and i did!
Figure 2: segment of the Long Bacon v2, now fully ribbed for your viewing pleasure :3
warning: below is some knitting ramble im not entirely confident about. if im wrong please tell me and i'll fix it.
For this project, i had to figure out how to do vertical color changes - at the time i was knitting English style, which for the uninterested means less active control but simpler to learn and more flexibility in changing things up (as opposed to Continental style, wherein the yarn and both needles are always in hand). point is, it was safe to just drop all the colors i wasn't using for the current stitch, and pick them up again when the time came. Generally, as far as i know, the term for changing colors mid-row is Intarsia, and it's the most common technique for patterned sweaters and tapestries and such. This, parallel vertical lines, is the simplest possible application of intarsia. Notice anything about sweaters and tapestries? theyre not really reversible. there's an outside, to be looked at, and an inside that sits hidden against the skin or wall. But a scarf is not like a sweater. Scarves twist and fold and bend. and, well, my technique was not exactly seamless…
Figure 3: back of the Long Bacon v2, showing the seams. Seamful.
in future projects, I'd like to find a way to avoid this. I went and made another one in the Aroace pride colors which has the same problem, because i did it in the same way. I just started a Genderfluid Bacon and have been trying a couple new techniques, but am not confident with any of them.
A possible way forward is with Brioche Crochet, which uses double slip stitches in the back loop to make a sideways knit-like rib texture. Due to the way the crochet stitches interlock, the seam isn't pushed to either side of the work and just exists internally - however, due to being made a completely different way, the ridges also don't squeeze themselves back together like a true knit rib. Still, with a thinner yarn and different design parameters, you can absolutely make a beautiful ribbed pride scarf with brioche crochet - which I did for a former partner. Fae still wears it around, so i must have done something right /shrug
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You're probably wondering, "how long actually is the long bacon?" Good news, I measured it, and documented on wafrn!
https://app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/58fba054-ca37-4128-abbe-f1a7b9720793
short answer: Very
