Knit Along: Hand Spun Bouquet Scarf from Loopy Mango - Done!

Charming, happy, fast...

Honestly, the speed of this project is its attraction.  I ripped the whole thing out halfway through and still didn’t have time to get bored!  And it’s garter stitch.  Sure, its a happy, chunky, enormous garter stitch, but there’s something engaging about this yarn.  Maybe it’s the springtime-y colors I chose contrasting with fall’s warm hues all around me, but this was so very enjoyable.  

I wore it today and got stopped at least a dozen times--it’s an eye-catching accessory to be sure.  Suddenly I’m craving a hat to match.

I do have one misgiving:  I can’t help thinking I should have worked all the rosettes onto one side.  I wrangled them so that they alternated sides, because I’m not especially fond of scarves with “wrong” sides, but this also means I have lumpy rosettes poking me in the neck (well, they’re soft so I suppose they’re just prodding me, but it’s irritating just the same).  I think if I had it to do over--no, I am NOT frogging this a second time--I’d push all the rosettes to one side.  The yarn is loose enough that I could probably just nudge them over to one side even now.  It'd make for more color per square inch and something smoother against my neck.  Then again, turtleneck season is upon us so it soon won’t matter.

All in all, a truly satisfying project with perfectly stunning results.  Thanks, Loopy Mango!

Knit Along: Hand Spun Bouquet Scarf from Loopy Mango - Day 3

Peer pressure

So here I am, happily knitting along on my zippy little scarf, when my friend Camy shoots me a link to the same project on her Ravelry page.  She was with me when I visited Loopy Mango, and I knew she bought the same yarn in black with pink rosettes.  “Cute,” I think as I look at the photos of her scarf in progress.

  

I keep reading.  Camy starts talking about how she did her scarf.  How she decided she wanted longer and narrower, so she used bigger needles and cast on six stitches instead of eight.  Suddenly, my scarf looks fat and clunky.  Then she goes on about how she decided a serge edge--slipping the first stitch of each row--to give it a smoother line.  Now I look at the bumps on the edge of my scarf and convince myself they’d be itchy against my neck.  Did I see any of this before?  Of course not.  Would I have were it not for Camy?  I think we all know the answer to that.

When you can whip up the entire project in a single evening, it’s alarmingly easy to talk yourself into ripping the whole thing out and starting again.  “It won’t take long,” I coo to myself as I once again wind this into a fiber rosette volleyball.  “The thinner, longer scarf will give me more to play with,” I console my now empty needles (still size 35’s--I couldn’t totally copy Camy and switch to 50’s ‘cuz that’d be cheating).

You know what they say:  steal one idea, and it’s plagiarism.  Steal a couple of ideas, and it’s “research.”  Either way, I'm back to square one.  Or is that stitch one?

Knit Along: Hand Spun Bouquet Scarf from Loopy Mango - Day 1

"What can you recommend?"

One of the great pleasures of this blog is that I don’t pick my own projects.  You may think that’s odd, but I think of it like walking into a restaurant and ordering the special, sight unseen--you come away with the most amazing experiences you’d probably never have picked for yourself.

When is it okay to cheat?

This scarf is the kind of high-drama accessory I love, but I don’t know that I’d have chosen it from all the other lovely offerings at Loopy Mango.  Something as quick as Handspun Bouquet almost seems like cheating.  You should see me as I started to knit this--I laughed as if I’d just found the secret shortcut.  Like the lady who dumps canned stew into her own crockery and takes it to the church potluck--and gets away with it.

Not that this is cutting corners--no ma’am, this is one stunning bit of fiber.  So cool and artsy that I shall be intolerable when I wear it for the first time.  (Some might quip that I’m verging on intolerable now...yes, I hear you).  I’ve spent time just oogling the yarn as I wound it into the massive (and in, my eyes, un-portable) ball, taking notice of each individual rosette.  Each of those lovely flowers is more charming by the sheer fact that I didn’t have to make it.  

Want to know the ugly truth?

I couldn’t make something even as simple as one of these rosettes.  The ugly truth is that while I can knit up a storm, I am craft impaired.  I may have written two parenting books, but I’ve botched more MOPS crafts than you can shake a glue-gun at.

This, however, I feel confident I can handle.  The hardest part about this project?  Keeping my 19-year-old daughter from stealing it when it’s done.