Mardi Gras

For the last week or so, all I've been able to think about (craftwise, anyway) are the three hundred projects I'd rather be knitting than the ones I have in progress right now. So in the spirit of the day, I had a strawberry paczki for breakfast and cast on a scarf.

The astute (read: nerdy) among you will recognize the slightly-washed-out colors here: it's a Doctor Who scarf. It's the good Doctor's 50th anniversary, so this is the year I will finally knit the scarf, after talking about it since, like, 2006.

It's supposed to be a good-sized scarf, 12 inches wide and 13 or 14 feet long, so I happily cast on 50 stitches (for the 50th anniversary - because I like my cast-on numbers to mean something - don't make it weird) and knit the first purple stripe. Then I stopped and measured, and decided two things.

1) It was 11 inches wide. Eleven is definitely not twelve.

2) It was HUGE. Look, Tom Baker is a tall gentleman with lots of curly hair, he can get away with a foot-wide scarf. I am considerably shorter than he is, though I can definitely take him on in the "lots of curly hair" department, and I'm just going to look silly in a foot-wide scarf.

So as long as the scarf was already not 12 inches wide, with the 50 stitches, I decided to make it a bit narrower still. I unraveled it and cast on 41 stitches (because I'm 41, so everyone will know it's mine and I knit it this year) (yes), and knit the purple stripe again. It was much better, about 9 inches wide now (and Nine is my favorite Doctor, so this is a big win), so I carried on with the beige stripe. Well, with a few rows of the beige stripe. And then the buzzer on the dryer went off, so I stopped for a while.

I did do something this week other than have strange thought processes about sci-fi accessories. For instance, I finished my Honey Cowl.

Gorgeous! Unblocked, of course, but I'll get around to that, hopefully before this weekend when the Arctic Blast the Weather Channel is predicting shows up. The yarn is Knitpicks Wool of the Andes Tonal* in Deep Waters, and the needles were 6mm. This really is a spectacularly fun and beautiful pattern, you should knit one right away.

Last but not least: a couple of posts ago, I mentioned knitting a wrap for a wedding we'll be going to in April. Well, I still will do, but not that wrap. Over the weekend I bought a skirt for the wedding, and the skirt is definitely not going to support any of the gorgeous colors in that particular ball of yarn.

It will, however, support this color. How long has this been in my stash, waiting for me to need a red wrap? I don't even remember. Hurray for yarn, it's so much more patient than I am.

* Knitpicks website is refusing to show me Wool of the Andes Tonal. I hope it isn't discontinued.