“Nothing fancy,” he says. No cables. No lace. No bright colours or colourwork in-general. Illusion knitting is right out. No stripes. Isn’t keen on the 2-2 ribbing or basketweave looks. I will go insane if I have to knit this in a single colour all stockinette or garter stitch (in brown, no less. But not too dark and not too light). In the end, we were down to Moss Stitch, or possibly one of these two, or this linen stitch scarf.

So thank you, linen stitch. He chose you and I love you. You have saved my sanity. Two quick (according to me - not so much according to him) trips into yarn stores at my insistence, and he’d picked the colour and yarn.

Dec. 24, 2010: Swatching. Knitting with yarn doubled. On size 8 needles, gauge is 22 sts. = 4 in. (5.5 sts/inch). Man-recepient would like scarf to be roughly 56” long. Yarn math says that 56/4 = 14, 14 x 22 = 308 sts. to cast on. Yarn math confirmation: 5.5 x 56 = 308. Needs to be an odd number for the linen stitch pattern, so let’s say 307 stitches. In long-tail cast-on. Bugger, I need a drink.

Dec. 25, 2010: After 4 tries to cast-on without having a super-long waste of a cast-on tail, I gave up and cast on 351 stitches. The scarf will be roughly 64”. So say we all.

Dec. 28, 2010: A couple inches in. Why is it so easy to lose track of which side I’m on? And in the middle of a row, even. I don’t like to think about how many rows I’ve partly frogged so far.

Jan. 6, 2011: Starting to move along, slowly but surely. I have a feeling this is one of those things that I’ll think will never end and suddenly it’ll be like, “Surprise! It’s wide enough, you’re done!”

Jan. 14, 2011: Not far from being done now. Probably a couple more rows, about an inch of width.

Jan. 18, 2011: Bound off in the wee hours of the morning. He’s wearing it today. Didn’t bother blocking it - final length about 5.5 - 6 ft.

Jan. 28, 2011: He’s been wearing it just over a week now, and is very happy with it - though he did say if I were to knit him another scarf in the future, it wouldn’t hurt if it were a little longer. (He wasn’t sure before, that’s why he asked for it a little shorter.) I also wore it one evening, and I have to say, I really like this yarn. Very soft, nicely warm without being too much. I’m prone to sweatiness when wearing scarves, but had no issues with this yarn. I will likely be making one of these for myself. Just… not in brown.

Feb. 2, 2011: Interesting note after a couple weeks of wear. It seems the bind-off edge of the scarf is tighter than the cast-on edge. I did a regular bind-off and tried to keep it loose, but it’s still tighter than it should be. The result is that after some wear this has become more noticeable as the normal scarf stretch happens. It hangs a little bit curved now - interesting to note for the future. It could probably be fixed some with a quick blocking, but… it’s a scarf. And he likes it and wears it every day, which is more than any knitter can ask for. I suppose I could take out the bind-off and fix it, but that’s not a quick undertaking, since this is knit length-wise. We’ll see.

Feb. 12, 2011: In a fit of annoyance at the increasingly curving scarf, and wanting to learn something new, I went ahead and ripped out the bind-off. I’m now redoing it with Elizabeth Zimmerman’s sewn bind off. Wow, I love this, even though I don’t love sewing. It’s perfect, just the right amount of stretch and it looks more like the cast-on edge. Damn, knitters are smart.