Scarves, Christmas and otherwise
Scarves are a constant last-minute Christmas gift. They're fast, they're easy, I can crank out one in an afternoon. This year, I'd actually been knitting scarves to use up the last of my Wool-Ease since the summer. I thought this was a brilliant plan -- I'd be done before Christmas hit!
I think I sent out only one of my pre-made scarves. Oh well.
So here are the scarves I finished in the last month or so:
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Yarn used, from first to last: Patons Soy Wool in "Natural Earth", 3 skeins (primarily because I wanted to match colors seamlessly), size 4mm needles. Schaefer Yarns' "Little Lola" in Georgia O'Keefe, 1 skein, size 4mm needles. Lion Brand Wool-Ease Sprinkes, Green Heather, 5mm needles. Cascade 220 Quattro, 2 skeins (with lots of leftovers), size 4mm needles. Cascade 220 Superwash, 1 skein, 5mm needles. Patons Classic Merino in Forest, 1 skein, 4mm needles.
Lest you think these are all the scarves I'm working on, I also have one "traveling" knitting project on needles and one garter stitch scarf I'm doing as a meditation/knitting project. Oh, and I finished another scarf, whose picture has not made it into this colleection.
The stitch patterns: Farrow rib, 2x2 rib, garter, 2x2 rib with pompoms, broken rib, 2x2 rib. The traveling project is triple rib.
The sheep who are being so kind as to model my projects are, from first to last: ÜnterSchëpenfloppen, a Steiff sheep from Las Vegas; Twinkle Sheep, who has a wind-up music box in her back; Agnes, from the Auckland International Airport; Sweetest Softest Lambie, from Bath and Body Works in the Redmond Town Center; Lavender Sheep, an aromatherapy sheep with a warmable pouch in her tummy, from the Discovery Channel Store in Bellevue, WA (before it closed); and Woolo, who hails from somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. All of these are cherished parts of my sheep collection. :)
Scarves are awesome for travel knitting. A pair of needles, a ball of yarn, and I'm off to the races. I can crank out one in an afternoon (the finished one not shown here is one of those), and they often don't require a lot of attention. A 2x2 rib scarf is a perfect thing to take to the movies; the last of those scarves was knit almost entirely during "I Am Legend". (No, I don't need light to knit by for a project like that.)
I travel-knit when I'm out to eat, when I'm at the movies, when I'm over at a friend's house, when I'm on a long car ride, on the bus, or any other time I know I'm going to need to fill more than a few minutes. The only trouble with using scarves for this is that it tends to leave me with a lot of new projects, which sort of goes against my New Year's goal. Still, I've been keeping that goal, having finished four projects, thrown out one WIP I was never going to finish, and started only... counting the travel knitting, right?... five. I'm at parity!
Giving myself permission to toss WIPs I'll never finish is really handy. I'm hoping to do more of that in the upcoming weeks. Who knows -- it might clear out enough of my stash closet to get the yarn currently living on the craft room sofa into the closet itself. Maybe. >_> <_<
