Enveloping and enfolding, this poncho is not only the ultimate comfort blanket, in which to utterly lose yourself, it’s also really stylish, and makes a real statement when worn out and about. No one will be able to ignore you, wearing such a striking and eye-catching piece!

The poncho takes the shape of a “stellated octagon”, or an octogram.While I’m sure the angles aren’t exact enough to warrant the term, as far as mathematicians are concerned, it works well enough for me here! Suffice to say, it’s an eight-pointed star.
In my sample, I have used six main colours (Yarns A, C, D, E, F, and G), creating bold, colour-blocked stripes, and one base colour(Yarn B),which remains constant throughout the piece. It just so happens that I have chosen the six colours of the Pride Rainbow Flag for my stripes, starting with red at the voluminously rolled collar, then working through orange, yellow, green, and blue, before finishing off with purple at the widest point. My base colour is a delicate, light grey.

You may, of course, only want to make your Superstar Poncho out of two colours—one for the knits, and one for the purls—and keep those two colours consistent throughout. That would look very striking indeed, and I hope to be able to see pictures of the work of anyone who does decide to go down that route! Or you may want to have a completely different number of stripes from my six. If that’s the case, I’m afraid you are on your own, as far as working out how many balls of each colour you will need.

Another, perfectly valid choice, would be to treat this project as a way of using up old stash, or scraps of DK- weight yarn you may have lying about the house. I think that would look amazing, and would mean you don’t have to worry about anything except having enough yarn in total to complete your poncho.

The pattern, however, has been written as if you were planning to make your Superstar Poncho with the same width of stripes as I have in mine. If you are going a different way, simply ignore the bits of instruction that relate to my colour changes, except for the one in the collar (see the paragraph that follows immediately after this one for what I mean by that).

The colour placement for the rolled collar ensures that your main colour choice will always be on show, even if the collar edge rides up into the neck section while wearing. To achieve this, the collar is worked with the colours “inside out” in comparison with the main body of the poncho to begin with, then they switch over, so that a “colour buffer zone” can be created, keeping everything in view that should be in view, and everything that shouldn’t be, out of view, when the poncho is being worn.

Although it might seem that such a huge piece of knitting must be a really daunting prospect to consider, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, it’s big. There’s no denying that. It is, without doubt, the largest pice of knitting I have ever had on my needles, but that doesn’t mean it is difficult. Quite the opposite, in fact: once the pattern has been established, it is a simple four-round repeat, that keeps going until the poncho reaches the desired size.That makes it brilliant for telly knitting, or knit-night knitting.

It also means that you can stop knitting your poncho whenever it gets to be the size that suits you best. I love the fact that mine comes down to my knees, but I’m six feet tall. You may not need one that large, or, you might want it even larger, for extra comfort.
The choice is yours: just be sure to stop at the end of a complete set of four rounds, before moving onto the graft, and if you are making a striped poncho, you’ll need to juggle some numbers at the start, based on my row gauge, and the length you want, to ensure that your stripes are even in width.

Or you might just not care about such things and I couldn’t fault you for that…