Knitted Scarves

First off I would like to thank everyone for their input on my last post about how you deal with comments received on your blog.  It has all been most helpful, and I'll be altering how I deal with comments a bit in the future!  If only we had one of these handy volumes to guide us through these little grey areas of virtual etiquette!

 

Dear Emily Post and her 73 published editions of this "Blue Book of Social Usage".

 

Unfortunately, this edition printed in 1945 doesn't cover blogs.  I started reading through little bits of this book this morning, and became thoroughly engrossed in it all.

Anyway ... all that will be dealt with in time.  Today I want to show you my finished scarf for my sister!  I wrote about it in this post, and this week I was thankfully able to get the thing off my needles (just needs ends woven in and blocking).

The scarf measures about 7" wide and 65" long (just shy of the 68" suggested in the pattern).

 

The pattern was very easy, but I just found it so monotonous knitting the zig zags for some reason.  Maybe because I stuck with the knitting for longer periods of time than I normally spend sitting down.

 

I wanted to finish it before other Christmas projects, so I pushed through to the end, and finally just sat down and spent all of Sunday working on it and finished it up.  I'm a fairly slow knitter, and this took me two weeks to finish.  And there's the tiny ball of leftover yarn.  I couldn't decide whether to knit through one more pattern repeat or just finish it off.  Not knowing exactly how far that tiny ball would take me, I decided to play it safe and bind off ... I'd had enough of knitting this anyway ;)

 

I really like the bamboo yarn, but had a few too many spots where the yarn had "torn" and I had to break it off and start a new row.  Luckily, I only had to rip out maybe half a row at the most when one of these annoying tears suddenly appeared.  So now it's ready to deliver to my sister, who conveniently has a birthday next week.  Although we don't normally exchange gifts, perhaps this one time she'll overlook that and be surprised that I actually finished it!

 

Whenever we go to sewing/knitting shows together we make a pact that we can't buy anything new unless we've got all our WIPs finished!  It works for me. 

 

And now I've started on the Christmas stuff.  I want to make my daughter an infinity scarf, and although the yarn I purchased for that came with a pattern for one, I wanted to make up my own pattern.  I started with a "scroll stitch" which looks really nice with this blue yarn.  The only problem is that after one repeat of the pattern, I noticed the scarf had become "scalloped" along the bottom edge. 

 

 

I had knit only a couple of start-off rows because I want to sew the two ends together when it's finished.  But I think the scalloped edge will make it difficult to do this neatly.  Does anyone have experience with this sort of problem?  I don't want to knit too many plain rows at the beginning and end because I don't want there to be an obvious join when it's sewn together.  If I can't figure anything out, I'm going to have to work out some other way of doing this.  The scroll pattern was perfect for this yarn too, as the colours and the pattern together make it look like waves (difficult to see in the photo on this small knitted bit). 

 

I must tell you too that when I went back to the dollar store to pick up two more knitting boxes, I found these handy plastic clipboards that fit right inside the box. 

 

 

 

Perfect for me who likes to tick off finished knitted rows on a piece of paper.  I can also clip the pattern to the board as well and have the whole little package nestled in the box for knitting times.

 

 

 
 
 
Just another little organizational thing that's pretty too ;)

 

And now I'll leave you with a photo of the fish tank all set up with fish, who have transferred to life indoors very smoothly.  Cody seems to like this spot too!  One feature we hadn't planned on was that we can see the shadows of the fish swimming by on the front door (you can sort of see it in this photo).  An odd little surprise ;)

 

That pretty fish in the centre with the long flowing tail fins is one of two shebunkins (the other one is facing away on the far left).  Shebunkins are such pretty fish and every time we bring them indoors we're amazed at how much they've grown!  The rest of them are goldfish.

 

Well, that's me all caught up for now!  I have a rare day off today, and will be working on my surprise that I hope to share with you in a few days.  I just hope the hydro crew working around the corner at one of those big electrical boxes keep the power running today (unlike yesterday ... on!  off!  on!  off!).  I saw them there again when I came home from walking above pooch, and immediately plugged in the kettle for tea ... just in case!

 

Thanks for stopping by everyone!

 

Wendy