I have not knit all that many scarves over the years – maybe a handful or two. I don’t have a special reason for avoiding them, really – other than lack of a passionate calling to knit them, or a particular love of wearing them. I mean, a good warm scarf in the winter is pretty much a necessity around here, and over the last few years, I’ve been warming up (yuk yuk) to the idea of wearing a pretty scarf to liven up a boring t-shirt.
The only thing I really have against scarves as a knitting project is all that flipping back and forth, and the longer the project gets the more annoying it can be to deal with the thing danging and twisting. Small irritants, really, and no real reason to avoid them overall.
Still, it’s a bit of an odd coincidence that the only real knitting (plain socks don’t count!) I have on the needles around here is a pair of two very different scarves.
I’ve mentioned this first one here before – I cast on for it months ago and have knit on it sporadically between other projects or when I needed some easy at-home knitting. It’s the Yarn Harlot’s One-Row Handspun Scarf pattern, which is easy as pie, knit in my own two-ply spun from Mountain Colors Targhee wool.
It’s getting quite long, obviously. But it’s also a bit on the narrow side for a warm outerwear scarf, so it will probably be worn doubled. In which case long is good. I still have maybe a third of the yarn left, and I keep meditating on whether to call it a day on the scarf and make a matching hat or mittens. So far, my gut keeps telling me that long is good and to stick with the thing a while longer. I just hope I’ll find someone to wear it when it’s done.
Now this second scarf – it has its own little story. I bought some insanely expensive Artyarns beaded silk-cashmere last year for my birthday. This yarn is beautiful. It is gorgeous. I have had it on my desk since then, petting it and admiring it on a regular basis. I’ve been looking for the perfect pattern to knit with it ever since.
Trouble is, first it was very short yardage – a total of only 230 for the two skeins. Second, you pat that kind of money for some yarn, and it sets the expectations for the finished product pretty high. Higher, in fact, than I would expect the satisfaction of a handknit scarf to reach on my own personal expectation meter. Which actually, once accepted, tends to take some of the pressure off if you can understand the futility of it.
The right time to knit it up finally came. I finished the sweater project I’d been working on, and figured it couldn’t possibly take very long to knit up 230 yards of yarn into a scarf – it would make a nice little snack-sized project before I dip into the next big one. I scanned back through all the patterns I’d favorited, flipped through all the books I remembered as containing a potential perfect pattern. Aside from intuitive appeal, I was mostly looking for a very open lace design (to stretch the yarn as far as possible) with a visually defined pattern that would off-set the static of the hand painted colors.
I settled on Jackie Erickson-Schweitzer’s Raspberry Rhapsody Scarf from The Knitters’ Book of Yarn. At the end of the first skein, it’s about fifteen inches long semi-blocked, so it’s going to be quite short, but definitely long enough to wear either tied or secured with a shawl-pin. I promise it’s much prettier in person – the sparkly clear crystal beads make it almost into a piece of jewelry. It’s going to be nice, especially if while I’m wearing it I can manage to forget how much the yarn cost. 
I also hate the bulk hanging down when knitting the sleeve onto a sweater. I finally figured out that by putting the finished part into a plastic bag, it’s much easier to turn. That might work for a scarf too. Not a big bag, just big enough to hold the finished part.
Judy