Blogging sadly neglected lately but the craft room and guest bathroom are looking great. My dear sweet hubby is down there right now doing the touch ups on the walls and when that's finished it's movin' in time! I am not looking forward to carrying the heavy shelves around or to sorting out the mountain of craft supplies. But I am looking forward to finally being able to use my sewing machine! In the meantime - while I wasn't painting or lying on the sofa moaning about not wanting to paint - I took some time off from knitting the York sweater to whip up a scarf for the Red Scarf Project. I had a general idea in mind of what I would like the scarf to look like, festive, with texture and color but not a variegated yarn because I work with Noro so much and wanted to do something different for a change. I searched around and found some Schachenmayr Nomotta Rainbow in color # 30 at Elann. It is about half cotton and half acrylic. I've never worked with cotton before and it felt pretty weird at first. It was slower on the needles. I started out trying to use my acrylic straights but couldn't stand the drag so I switched to some Susan Bates needles. It was kind of strange to use straight needles at all because I almost always use my good old Addi Circ's.

Anyhow - here's what I came up with:



I used size 11 needles and held the yarn doubled since it's fairly thin. I wanted a light and open look so I used my new favorite technique of yarnovers which get dropped off and pulled up on the next row. I am also making another scarf with this sort of pattern right now though so it's getting to be a bit like beating a dead horse at this point! The other fun new thing I did was fringe. Yep - I've never done fringe before. I think I had a bit of fringe-a-phobia. It seemed like something that would be uninteresting and time consuming - all the sorts of stuff I'm too lazy to do. To my surprise it actually went really quickly! Maybe now I can muster up the initiative to put the fringe on the Anntorp wraps I made and get them off of my UFO list. :)

Here's a detail of the pattern with the fringe:



In this photo you can see the little bits of color in the yarn. I think the scarf is much prettier in person because the flash washed out the colors a bit. That's the problem with having to wait until hubby gets home to take photos. :(

Anyhow - the scarf will be on it's way this week as soon as I weave in the pesky end bits. :)