The scarf I never want to take off

With unprecedented discipline, I stuck with my scarf, resisting the urge to cast on for a dozen different projects. The knitting muses rewarded me with a beautiful finished project that is pretty much what I imagined. This project is great if you are adventuresome and want to try some simple designing. Basically, you just try out different stitches. It worked out on mine that the cabled and other solid portions are opposite the lace patterns when it hangs on my neck. That's nice, but I think it would have looked good anyway. What I really liked about this project was getting a sense of how various stitches look and feel compared so directly to one another. Cable stitches pull in. Lace stitches are fluid but roll in on the edges. Moss sitch is stiff and not very smooth. Overall, the scarf rolls up a little more on the edges than I'd like, but that helps hide the differences where the cable pulled in more than the lace. The yarn is Blue Sky's Alpaca/silk blend. It is wonderful to work with - very soft. My scarf took exactly two skeins.

The project took me about two weeks. It is the sort of thing you could keep in a drawer and work on between other projects. I just really wanted a scarf since it's gotten so cold here. I picked most of my stitches from the Vogue knitting book. I used 42 stitches - three for the border on either side, which left 36 for the stitches.