This is my first winter wearing this scarf made from recycled sweater yarn especially selected to match my red coat. (Stupidly, I also wore it in NYC when all the kids dress like slutty, sexy, and sloppy Santa and go bar-hopping – I fear I may have been mistaken for one of them at a distance).
But all Santas aside, last year I found this moth-eaten semi-fulled [felted] cropped turtleneck sweater at a thrift store. I thought it was god-awful, or “gawful.”* I like bright colors, wool, and three big cheers for gay pride rainbows, but I thought this was just something that few should wear – it might just be best for a child. Since it was already ruined by holes and aggressive washings (and had the magic unzippy seams) I happily frogged the bitch.
Nice balls, eh? It then dawned on me that half of the colors** matched a Harris Tweed coat I scored months earlier.
I don’t wear much red – I prefer orange, and I think red generally washes me out. I have nothing against it per se, I just don’t choose it, and don’t have anything to wear with it – green would look way too x-masy, yellow would make it mustard and ketchup, and my rusty murky colored things don’t work. I have a grey scarf languishing on the needles, and another dark cowl that would look decent enough with the coat, but I decided it needed an equally loud accessory. I wanted a sideways constructed scarf or cowl so I could have long skinny rows and few, if any tails to weave in. I was also itching to do a large project in linen stitch – I found Cerus Scarf by Hilary Smith Callis in ravelry, and though it’s not so much a pattern as just cast-on-this-many-stitches-and-then-do-this-stitch, I linked to it for the sake of conformity, much like the drunk Santas do every year.
Thankfully I didn’t wear any green so as not to be confused with the drunken masses attending the St. Pat’s day parade in the city yesterday. I would have worn this cacophony of reds in opposition and protest of toxic colored alcoholic beverages*** and the assholes who spew them on the streets and trains, but alas the weather was a bit wicked and I lurked about in my muds and rusts.
*I didn’t realize this was already a used term, see here.
**This was another project that surprised me in terms of color and color dominance. I only did one row of the pale yellow and it absolutely screams out and takes the pink along with it, bleaching it down. And where is the orange? Though I did an extra row of orange, you almost don’t even see it. If I had more yarn, I’d like to try a version without the yellow and pink and see if that gives it more of a murky glow. And I’m still on the fence about removing the kinky fringe and stitching it into a cowl… I usually opt out of fringe, and I’m not sure why I don’t sorta like it, but I think it’s because if it’s too close to your face on a windy day it goes into your mouth? Or maybe it is something from childhood. I don’t have a specific plan for the harvested blues and greens yarn yet, but the smaller balls make them excellent for sideways designs…
***Nothing wrong with a good alcoholic beverage, just those that involve dye, or a culture of mass sloppy public drunkenness.
ASTITCHMATISM 