Sunshine, daisies, butter mellow,
Turn this stupid, fat rat yellow.
That silly "spell" didn't work for Ron Weasley in "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" as he tried to turn his rat familiar, Scabbers, yellow, but this butter-yellow yarn from my stash knitted up beautifully to make a cozy pocket scarf for Mika and Emmy.
The sport-weight fiber worked to a gauge of about 4-5 rows per inch. And since I wanted a scarf 80 inches long (to turn up 10 inches at each end for deep pockets, leaving an overall length of about 60 inches), I made the scarf 400 rows long. (Which actually turned out to be a bit too long, but that was OK; I just made the pockets deeper to compensate.) The yarn is an interesting blend of 55% acrylic, 35% rayon, 5% wool, and 5% vinyon (whatever that is!), but the fiber is safe to machine wash and dry, so it's easy to care for.
Cast on with at least 6 rows of waste yarn in a contrasting color to your project yarn, then add your project yarn and crank until you have the desired number of rows. Cast off with another 6 or more rows of waste yarn, then remove project from the machine. Using a 5mm crochet hook, close each end of the tube as shown in this video by Jojo Juju. Fold each end of the scarf until the pockets are as deep as you want and pin them in place with locking stitch markers. Mattress stitch both sides of each pocket and knot securely. Hide all tails inside the tube, and enjoy your new pocket scarf!
Jojo also has a full video tutorial for how to machine-knit a pocket scarf, which you can view at this link.
The sport-weight yarn is rated a 2, when usually size 4 yarn is used in the circular knitting machines. For me the trick to getting lightweight yarns like that to work in the machine is to maintain a firm tension.
I had just enough yarn left after knitting the scarf to make a matching beanie of 113 rows.
