FO: Better Red Than Dead

The past few weeks have been all about the Khrushchev era.  The Kremlin's shifting focus at this time plays a considerable role in my fourth and arguably most crucial chapter, so I have spent a lot of time recently reading 400-600 page biographies (It seems many are obsessed with writing about Khrushchev. Who knew).

Enter Mimi Hill's Simple City pattern, a nice garter stitch triangular scarf with an eye-catching ruffle, perfect for that special skein of verigated yarn for which I just couldn't seem to find the right pattern.  I bought the $4 pattern during a pattern sale that she had in which I got a deal on a bundle of patterns.  Expect to see more projects from her patterns, because I am sure that they are all as clearly written as Simple City.

The pattern itself is deceptively simple.  I seem to be gravitating towards patterns that are designed more to create something of distilled beauty than to show off a super complicated stitch pattern or technique.  This probably has a lot to do with the fact that I try to combine my knitting with reading whenever possible.  But don't be fooled.  I totally screwed up my increases somewhere in the middle.  Something to do with a stitch marker that would not stay put, and then broke, and a zillion stitches on the needles.  Fortunately the verigation appears to hide knitting that looks like it was done by a four year old on a sugar high who was just rescued from time out.

The yarn is Blue Moon Fiber Arts in Knitters Without Borders.  This is that special skein that I picked up in a Ravelry destash to celebrate the end of my first semester of grad school.  I tried a couple different patterns with it, but nothing worked.  It all came out looking like what I would call Vampire Puke. Aka, not pretty.  I actually did not knit the entire scarf because I ran out of yarn, so I did fewer increase rows following the directions in the pattern and shortened the ruffle.

Hair, scarf, shirt -- All wind-blown

I have already worn this scarf twice (it's perfect for beach heat where there's enough of a breeze to be cold in 90 degree weather) and have gotten tons of compliments.  One knitter asked me if the pattern is on Ravelry, which was probably the best compliment I could have gotten.  If someone likes my version of a pattern so much that they want to knit it themselves, I have more than done my job.