Warm and Fuzzy...

February 3, 2014

I believe that God only gives us so many minutes on this earth and I don’t want to waste any of them.  Therefore, I keep a portable knitting or crocheting project on hand for the small amounts of time that I spend riding in a car, waiting for medical appointments or sitting in the local government meetings where I accompany Charming as he badgers the governing body about reigning in their spending of taxpayer money. 

One such project is a multi-colored scarf that I finished this week.  I knitted it out of some of the dozens of miniscule balls of leftover sock yarn that I accumulated over the years and had stashed in a huge Zip-Loc bag in my “Studio”.  (“Studio” sounds so much more artsy and glamorous than “craft room,” so I’ve decided from this point forward to use that term to legitimize my current cluttered workspace where furniture displaced by the kitchen renovation currently resides alongside my sewing machine, serger and spinning wheel.  Also, I’ve consciously decided to refer to myself as a “fiber artist”.  It just sounds so much more impressive than the pale reality of “unemployed crafter”.)

Getting back to the scarf…I used Size 9 knitting needles and cast on 325 stitches.  Each row is knitted in a different color.  As I added each row, I left a tail of approximately 8 inches long and continued knitting to the end of the row where I left another tail of the yarn about 8 inches long.  As I worked, I tied the tails together (two at a time) at the end of the rows.  You could also wait until you finished the scarf and then tie the tails together (again, two at a time) along each edge of the scarf.  The finished dimensions of the scarf are six feet long by six inches wide.  Since the scarf has so many different colors in it, you could effectively use every scrap of yarn you have in your leftover stash.  It wouldn’t even matter if you have to change yarns in the middle of a row because it all blends in and looks pretty no matter what colors you use or in what order you use them. 

Below are pictures of the project mid-way through as well as the finished product.  (I found the lovely blonde model hanging around the house with nothing to do, so I convinced him that scarves look just as good on males as they do on females.  This is his "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful" look.)

"Don't hate me because I'm beautiful."