Potato chip

So, I've reached the point of sewing up the baby dress, and my mom was visiting, so no work could be done on Dad's socks, so the only answer this weekend was a throwaway project, the potato chip scarf:

This is a free pattern from Knitpicks, and it's pretty simple: cast on 150 stitches, knit one row, Knit front and back of every stitch on the next row, knit two rows, knit front and back, etc. It's super easy, but what they don't tell you is that, since the stitch count increases exponentially, in no time at all your 150 stitches have become 1,200 stitches, and you're taking over an hour per row. Binding off took me well over two hours. I had to stop halfway because I had to go to bed. So, even though overall the scarf took me only about a day and a half, I feel like it took forever.

For you non-knitters out there, 1,200 stitches is a lot--the sweaters I make are usually between 200-300 stitches around. Now, of course there are many more stitches total in a sweater, but there's something about that psychological milepost of the finished row that makes for easy knitting.

I used two balls of Berroco Furz in plum and one ball of Le Fibre Nobili Geisha in cherry (I think). Both are fun furs I had in my stash, so at least this interminable scarf was a true stash-buster. I can tell you the Furz is a much nicer yarn to work with than the Geisha, but since they're both discontinued, I don't know how much use this info is :-)

This is a lousy picture of it on (boy, do I need to clean that mirror!), but hopefully you can see the scarf's charming tendency to corkscrew. I'm actually extremely fond of it. I can see how making scarfs for gifts can be addicting, my grad school experience aside. I am considering giving away this scarf, though the more I prance about in it, the less likely that becomes.

Yes, it is called the potato chip scarf because no one can make just one. Maybe next time I will make liberal use of stitch markers for milestones.