Wrapped in Warmth

I’m a scarf person. I love the warmth they add.  I love the style they add – an instant dose of urban edginess or soft sophistication or bohemian quirkiness .  And yet I have hardly any knitted scarves.

I know.  The mind boggles.

I missed the whole scarf stage of knitting.  Sure, I knit a scarf as my first project – the ridiculously long scarf of my dreams.  The scarf that I’d wanted since I was 10 and dreaming of studying literature at Harvard or some other place in an eternal fall…the scarf I’d wear when that dashing foreign student saw beneath my brainy, shy exterior and wooed me with poetry.  I knit that scarf for endless weeks and still love wearing it.  But after that, I moved swiftly into hats and then sweaters.  I was cold, man.  I needed the big items.

But I’m a scarf person.  And I live in an area devoid of fabulous stores, and certainly thousands of kilometers from the pedestrian zones of Europe where scarves hang in a rainbow of colours, an eternal temptation of texture and hue. I need to look to this wardrobe gap.

Which brings me to the Personal Yarn Club. Before the new year, I bagged up a number of yarns and patterns, handed them to Rainer, and asked that he deliver one to me each month.  A yarn club of my own making.  The reason I haven’t written much about it is that the first delivery brought yarn for a Christmas present. No spoiling surprises – what fun is that?

This month, Rainer brought out a bag on February 1st, much to my confusion since he’d declared I would have to have finished the previous project before a delivery would come.  A little added motivation. So I was puzzled that he’d changed his tune. When I opened it, I was floored. The yarn was a total surprise. I’d never seen it before in my life. Never even heard of it, actually.

He’d been away at a library conference in Toronto that week and had walked to a yarn shop in order to bring something home. He’s been to more yarn shops than I have since he travels more, and always buys the sweetest treats.

The yarn, Diamond Foot Loose in colour 12 (Harlequin), is full of short repeats, just enough for a stitch or two per colour: orange, red, olive, and navy.  It is becoming a Karius, the stockinette version of the side-to-side scarf pattern Baktus. Easy knitting for moments when I’m reading or traveling.

It’s such a nice project to work on, knit on 3.5 mm needles for soft drape, mindless and soothing.  Watching the stockinette roll is pure delight – wrapped around my neck it’s going to have just the right look. The multiple hues will mean it fits with a wide range of clothes.   That the pattern is named after a moralistic Norwegian story about tooth trolls…priceless.

My eye is also caught by a Glampyre pattern called Reclamation. Another triangular scarf, this one knit in the traditional direction. Simple but with a texture that would make a yarn show it’s best side. I’ve a number of single skeins in my collection that might just have found their future.

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