Life post-chocolate is good. Watching house, working on Ben’s scarf.
He had originally stated that he wanted a scarf about a foot wide. I laughed. This one is about eight and three quarters inches wide when relaxed. It’s pretty monstrous, as I documented this evening:
He saw the picture and said, “Maybe the second one should be half that size…” But I think everyone should have a scarf that’s absolutely monstrous. It’s a great replacement for outerwear. But, making a second one half that size would be a fantastic excuse to con him into buying me some addi turbo 12″ circular needles, which I’ve never tried. Follow my logic here:
-Striped scarves should NEVER be made flat, as this involves a ridiculous amount of weaving in of ends. It’s enough to make any sane knitter dive overboard, even if they’re not on a boat. In a tube, one *can* weave in the ends if one is stupid enough, *or* one can just carry them up the inside like a normal person and let them hang. No one will ever know. Plus, you get that nice flat stockinette look which is nice with stripes.
-A skinny striped scarf would therefore have to be made on either DPNs or a small circular needle. Now, before you get all righteous and tell me that of course I could make an entire scarf on DPNs, let me mention that I have done this thing, which I’m sure few knitters have. When I was poor and could afford few needles, I did *everything* on DPNs, including a couple tube scarves. But I really don’t want to revisit that time in my life. As I prefer metal needles, the obvious choice for non-DPN small-circumference circular knitting is the addis.
-I just love luxury tools for my craft. Don’t you? I think part of this obsession comes from the fact that this current scarf is on Susan Bates needles that I *hate* with the fire of 1000 suns. It’s making me dream dreams of lovely slick shiny pointy addi turbos at night.
I also cleaned my room (well, got a good dent in it at least. I found my floor and have clean sheets.) And I started the Great Stash Organization of 2008. This year, I’m going for a shape-driven organization, rather than a color or weight organization. Thus, WIPs will be in one place, skeined yarns in another, hanked yarns in another, and caked yarns in a fourth. The idea is that it’ll be space-efficient and the yarns will be less likely to tangle if they’re stacked neatly with their own kind. My dad gave me an awesome plastic bin, so I set to work on the cake bin and did a ton of rewinding of tangles and frog-worthy projects, resulting finally in this:
It’s a start. I’m contemplating all of my random leftover yarn and thinking I should start making squares for a picnic blanket. And make Ashley and Lily and Felicity make squares out of their leftovers too. And then recruit others. And then form a Society for Picnic Knitting. (and no, I will not replace the C’s in “picnic” with K’s. That’s just bad.)
All in all, not a bad day, at least yarn-wise.
And there’s a cool secret message hidden in the stripes in Ben’s scarf, and secret stripe patterns ALWAYS make me happy.
