a tale of two scarves

I remember this clothing swap, back in October. Rachel had this pink scarf she was swapping, in some hideous shade of bright magenta. It was finely-knit 1x1 ribbing with a weird flare at either end. It was all sorts of misshapen, and full of holes. And it was 100% cashmere.

I knew about recycling good quality sweater yarns (none of those cotton/poly blends, ew) but I never figured it was worth the effort. Something about this ugly duckling scarf awoke the urge in me. I needed to turn it into a swan. So I snagged it, revealed my intentions to Rachel, and immediately that evening began snipping away at the ends until it unravelled.



It was time consuming. At first, I just unravelled like a crazy person, piling loose yarn into a lump. Big mistake. It tangled when I tried to wind it; I figured out I had to wrap the yarn around my hand, to be felted and rejoined into continuous strands later. I had little curly balls of pink yarn bouncing around everywhere. I think it took something like a week before I formed two complete skeins.





Bear in mind, this was before I discovered what setting on my camera produces real-life colors. It was a little more ugly in person.

Then the fun part! I dyed it, using tea bags and a splash of red food coloring. I didn't want to deviate a ton from the original color, just tone it down a little (a lot). The result was fairly successful.





See the difference?

The original scarf was maybe 4 feet long. I figured, I'd hold the yarn double, work it in lace, and end up with something light, airy, warm, and crazy long.

Rachel right away expressed interest in it. It's not really a color I like, but it's right up her alley. According to Ravelry, I started this scarf in January, with the secret intentions of giving it to Rachel at some point. I anticipated working on it for maybe a couple of months, at most.



Here's where I was after one month.

Fast-forward to July! Rachel's birthday is coming up, and this scarf has been at the bottom of my bag for six months. I'm procrastinating by starting new projects left and right. It's hard, guys. Lace knitting is not great. The pattern took me months to get accustomed to. I forced myself to work on it, and it's slow going. The scarf was about three feet long when I started worrying that I'd run out of yarn. I toyed with the idea for about 20 seconds of unravelling it and starting over. Oh god.

But then it just kept growing. And growing. And growing. And soon, it was a snake:



The day before her birthday, literally (July 28), one of my skeins ran out of yarn. I wound them unevenly. I was so grateful for that. I just bound it off there, and immediately washed and blocked it. No time to waste!



Blocking something you've worked on for ages is easily the best part. It's all soft and pliable, and you can shape it however you want. For this scarf, I decided to leave the edges a little scalloped. That's how they wanted to be!



Post-blocking: the scarf is now super long, super crazy airy, super light and luscious (hey, that's the name of the pattern!) One of the things I'm discovering I love about dyeing with tea bags is the multifaceted color. It really pops in natural lighting, but it takes on a different appearance in different environments. (There's also the fact that I discovered the next day which setting on my camera produces good colors. I'm going to harp on this until the day I die.)


I took some artsy shots:







In the interest of sounding like a broken record, nearly all of the yarn in my Etsy store will make a much, much longer scarf. This is the least amount of yarn I've ever acquired from unravelling something. It seriously blows me away how much mileage you can get out of a lace pattern. Go get some!