Scarves

Right before I packed up and moved from Brooklyn, I had an insane urge to make a few bulky-yarn projects in order to:

1. Use up the bulky-yarn stash. I think all new knitters go through a phase where the answer is "bulky yarn" to all their yarn questions. It's fast all right. But damn, if you could get something to look flattering on something other than a waif, you deserve an award.

2. Justify my use of knitting time as making visual progress at a time when I felt like I was getting no where and spending my days on endless hold-music calls. Most of these things were all knitted in the course of an afternoon, and in one case, in the time it took for AT&T to dick me around and not resolve anything at all, even though I was asking nicely.

First up: a handspun cowl. It started out as a braid of Corriedale/Alpaca blend from Spunky Eclectic in the "Thunderstorm" colorway.

Great colors...nice and moody.

Spun it up as a chunky 2-ply.

Then I learned a fantastic new technique...the Mobius cowl.

It's a little tricky to get started, but it's simple once you do it. Randomly altering your knit and purl rows makes for interesting texture, and there are tons of different ways to make this your own.

I loved it so much, I went ahead and dug up bags of scarps of some Rowan Biggy Print (which may or may not have been in my stash for more than 7 years) and made a stripy, ultra bulky one on size 17 needles.

It's enormously warm, and I love the texture that the thick-and-thin yarn produced. I randomly alternated the two colors I had until I ran out of yarn, and poof! it's magic! Really, it would have been pushing it if I invested two hours in this.

So I kept on rolling with the Biggy Print, and made a mistake-rib scarf with what I had left:

The pattern (if you could call it that) is Franciose from "French Girl Knits". Mine came out short, so a pin or a button might be added at some point.

One more:

A VERY GLITZY alpaca batt from Loop!

I bought this ages ago, when I first started spindle-spinning. 2006 or '07. I spun it up pretty quickly, but then the yarn just sat in a bin for all these years. Shameful!

Spun up and plied, I only had 74 yards.

So I made a wee necktie out of it, based on this pattern (which called for laceweight yarn).

It does need a good blocking, but it used up all my yarn. Mission accomplished.

I felt clean and purged when that was done. No more odd skeins of overweight yarn to slow me down! Overly warm neckware to the rescue.