Uncle

So C is not far away from another trip to Nanjing and I have decided he needs a nice scarf for the trip. I got it into my head to do Henry. Bought two skeins of charcoal grey Alpaca Sox at the Woolie Ewe last week, and cast on Friday night.

Henry requires that you cast on 227 stitches in waste yarn, then pick up the good stuff and k1, yo all the way across, nearly doubling your stitch count. Not hard. Very elementary, in fact. Except that I didn't seem to end up with the right number of stitches. Four rows into it, even after having tinked back and reknit nearly 300 or so excruciating stitches, I decided it was not salvagable and ripped it out to start over. Did it all again. Same issue...couldn't get the right stitch count. It was working with the repeat, though, until the 3rd or 4th row then suddenly I didn't have the same number of stitches. I was NOT going to tink back another 400+ stitch row to figure out where I went wrong and the fuzzy alpaca makes reading the tiny stitches just a few rows in too much of a hassle. Saturday morning I decided that Henry and I are not meant to be together. I said "uncle" and refused to start a third time. So long, Henry.

So then I started investigating new patterns. I started a scarf using the hex afghan pattern in Knitting Nature. (That's the pattern on the cover, which you can see a little better if you enlarge it.) I think it would look great in a less fuzzy yarn and may have to do that later...but not with 60% alpaca....and I was worried about the practicality of knitting a six foot scarf on size 1 needles in one week.

I tried holding the charcoal grey alpaca along with some light grey Classic Elite Princess from the stash, and doing the One Row Scarf from the Yarn Harlot, but it all looked too mottled and the simple pattern got lost.

Tried holding the alpaca with some black Cascade 220, figuring it would blend in more, but it just looked kind of blah and the pattern was hidden by the black color.

By Saturday afternoon, I was beginning to doubt the sanity of my mission and was resigning myself to fact that the alpaca would need to be knit by itself...at a small gauge. In a week. I am nothing, though, if not dedicated to sending C off with a warm and elegant handknit scarf, so I decided to double it and cast on with number 3 needles.

The One Row Scarf pattern is perfect....no chart, no row counting, just a one row pattern that requires enough attention to keep me awake but simple enough to do while watching TV. and quite manly. He likes the scarf. Score one for The Wif.

The weather here has been dull and yesterday it rained all day. I sat and knit...and knit...and knit...and today has been more of the same. I'm 3 feet in. Unblocked, the scarf is just under 7 inches wide. DH is 6'2", so I am debating how long to make this...and I am also wondering if I should leave it as is and knit it to the length I want or if I should stop short and block it out longer. It will grow quite a bit if I block it, so I need to decide soon. But I think I can safely knit to four feet even if I want to block it.

As a side note, I cannot even imagine knitting socks out of this Alpaca Sox. I get that people living in the frozen tundra must appreciate the warmth, but the thought of swathing my feet in that much alpaca makes me want to go take an ice bath. The Texan in me can't wrap my brain around it. And the shedding. I'm an alpaca virgin...does washing it help get rid of the shed, or will the scarf shed like a Persian in July throughout its long life?

In approximately 45 minutes, Mr. Darcy will be joining me via Masterpiece Theater, so I'll be knitting away here while C is at the office. Maybe I can finish this out tonight in a one row knitting marathon.