The Scarf Chronicles: Chapter One

While words are fine, it's time I posted photographic evidence of my crochet labors, or no one will believe I've really done anything at all.  So, come join me in my kitchen and I'll spread the work on the counter for you pleasure.  Have a cup of tea and some almond biscotti while I tell you about the scarves.  The "group" photo above includes a large portion of them.  One, The Great Red, will come later.  I cannot stop working on it!  But, you will see, eventually, what I mean.

The original objective was to "use up" the yarn my sister gave me.  That would be the logical thing to do (waste not, want not).  But seven large bins of skeins?  And a lot of novelty yarn, which is difficult to work with and I really only need a little bit of the flashy stuff for accent, not entire scarves.  There was no possibility of it fitting into the already crowded space that my modest yarn collection occupied . . .  So, I kept little balls of a lot of the flashy yarn and shared the rest with my Freestyle friends.  We scrumbled for several meetings with it.

Next, I discovered (to my deep regret), the wool needed to go.  Allergies are hard bedfellows.  So I began to crochet the wool out of the studio—except that every now and again, I needed just a teeny weeny bit more, so I would take a small sample of the almost exhausted ball of wool and go shopping to buy more wool to finish out the project . . .  What was she thinking, you're asking.  Answer:  I don't think I was thinking at all.  I was just crocheting and loving every row of beautiful stitches that seemed to leap from the hook.  Mesmerized, I was.

As we've had suddenly autumn weather the last week, the wool can now be taken onto the patio and worked, especially the sheddy types.  The breezes sweep the wool particles away.  How kind of Mother Nature to do that clean-up job for me!

The Scarves.  The first is a scrappy piece, a loop of blues and sand-colored neutrals that I doubled over and stitched as a tube to help the looser-woven parts remain stable. It can be worn in a short, double loop, or as a single longer loop.   I was thinking of windy days by the sea as I worked:

Palest sky-blue merino mixed with another DK merino dyed shades of blue and green here.  The problem is that this loop scarf was meant to be a long, wide scarf, but the second skein of the sky blue merino was not where I thought I had stored it.  There are a number of things that could be said here about my planning abilities, but they can wait for another day.  I was short of yarn (of course!), and it was yarn I'd bought twenty years ago in Oak Ridge, Tennesee, hand-spun and impossible to duplicate.  After trying, unsuccessfully, to find something that could be used with it, I changed my plans and made it into this extra-long loop and put little "fingers" at the join. It is heavy and will create warmth under blizzard conditions:

Aren't the fingers delightful?

From bits and pieces came a narrow blue scrappy that is 50 inches long, 4 1/2 inches wide and quite light-weight. This would be nice worn with a winter knit blouse (or for a little boy, doubled over under his winter jacket):

The last of the loops (I have made two others as gifts for nieces Jessica and Nahum) is this red one of rich merino and a strand of red twisted with sequins.  This may be my holiday scarf.  It is light-weight and cheery:

I am now over scarf loops.

There are some serious keep-you-warm creations.  The second is the only scarf to which I added a fringe.  Long fringes can be so much trouble when you're shopping and going in and out of shops, unlooping a scarf . . .

After finishing them, I wondered how easily these wonderfully soft and thick scarves might fit around a person's neck, and that was when I made the decision to make longer and narrower pieces that could be looped twice around neck and shoulders without the bulk of these chunk yarn pieces.  Almost twenty years ago I wove a long, five inch wide scarf for my mother that was meant to be worn doubled, and it was quite striking with her classic suits.  She wore it on her shoulders and by doubling it, was able to catch up the ends of the scarf and draw them through the loop and hold it in place with a fancy pin.  I began to re-visit that idea, with variations on width and composition.

In the studio I keep a yarn basket where I toss the short ends of a skein, a colorful collection of any type and color of yarn.  This amazing scarf is the product of that lively basket, and one I will keep for myself.  I like it best rolled up, where its 144 inches (yes, four yards!) makes a circle that is six inches in diameter, looking for all the world like a colorful little flower (that comment from Anne).  The yarns range from slightly chubby worsteds to DK and fingering weights, a true conglomerate.

I should mention that I have scrumbled all of my life because it has always been so difficult for me to read a pattern.  I have a double stigmatism, which means that there are shadows on both sides of objects.  Imagine reading a cross-stitch pattern or finding your place in a closely-printed page of instructions when there are shadows popping up everywhere!  As a result of having done free-form crochet for so long, I have forgotten the proper way to crochet and make sensible objects.  The scarf project became a way of reminding myself the rules I could not grasp when I was eight and learning to knit and crochet from our neighbor, Bebe Webb.

This is the scarf I made from an idea I saw in a shop.  It took me a while to figure out how to do the little fingers on the side and keep everything as one continuous line rather than adding an edging afterward (as I did the cream cotton, which you'll hear about another day), but once I'd gotten the hang of it, this was purest stitching joy.  I used Kudo yarn:

Whee!!!  What a lot of looking and talking we've done today.  There are more finished pieces, and several still on the hook.  It is so much more interesting to have several projects going on simultaneously, different stitches, different yarn tensions to be balanced, more to think about . . .

Are you yawning, your eyes glazed over, attention wandering? Let us continue this another time.  You have been kindly uncomplaining during my ramble.  Thank you.  Now, may I pour you another cup of tea?