a tale of 29 scarves

Upon reviewing my knitting this year, I realized the output numbers are a little low: I think it's all because of the 29 scarves. I keep forgetting that a day contains a limited number of hours, so taking up a few minutes to knit scarves subtracts from the overall total to knit something else.

But let me back up and explain about the scarves.

For some reason, all the way back in March, I decided it would be a good idea to knit a ton of those super-fast scarves that I had done for Primo's FFA club for our church's annual holiday boutique fundraiser. In a random calculation, 30 scarves seemed equivalent to a ton, so I stalked Michael's for sales on that particular yarn.

And then I commenced to knitting.

I knit and knit and knit those scarves. Remember my pile of vacation knitting?

The three scarves at the top of the pile were knit that week. Those scarves were somewhere around numbers 15 to 17. They are the perfect car-passenger knitting, because I can still pay attention to directions and landmarks and such. They are the perfect meeting and waiting-for-kids knitting, because the pattern is so easily memorized: it is the same row, over and over again, across 14 stitches. (The pattern is here in case you are interested.)

I didn't quite make it to 30. As you may have guessed, 29 (actually 29¾) was as far as I got.

Twenty scarves were purchased at the boutique, for personal use and holiday gifting. It was fun watching some of them—including the red one on the top of the basket above—make reappearances in church over the next few weeks.

That left 9¾ scarves.

Our church had adopted three families for Christmas this year, two with mothers and one with a grandmother. I picked out three of the remaining scarves and put them aside for the matriarchs. One of the mothers came to pick up the gifts and was able to chose the one she liked best. She was crying over the gift of a hand-knit scarf just for her; she had asked for nothing for herself, just her children. Humbling and rewarding all at the same time. How often do hand-knit gifts reduce someone to tears?

Down to 6¾ scarves.

A call went out on a knitters' group about three weeks ago, for gender-neutral color scarves to be given to people in Rockaway, Queens that were displaced by Hurricane Sandy. Usually scarves take too long for quick response, especially right before Christmas, but I happened to have three perfectly gender-neutral scarves in my possession! Off they went to New York.

Despite my poor math skills, I know for a fact that 3¾ scarves are up in my workroom.

They already have a home. I will finish up that last one, and off they will go to Primo's FFA Fundraiser in January. Despite all the other knitting on my plate at the moment, I will probably polish off the last few remaining skeins, because my inability to add extends to figuring out how many skeins of yarn I needed. (At one skein of yarn per scarf, it wasn't particularly complicated.)

Those 29¾ scarves definitely cut into my knitting output but... I don't think I would have had quite as much fun, or gotten quite as much satisfaction, from anything else that took 3000 yards of yarn to create.