This morning, I'm doing an activity with my gen. bio. class. (It's called Beaker Babies and it is an entertaining way of going over Mendelian inheritance and some of the basic ideas of recombination.)

I love activities. The students get more involved and I don't have to talk much. Also, I think some of the students who don't learn as well from lecture learn well from these.

Last night I got a little knitting done. I started on the scarf pattern from last November's "Real Simple" magazine as a "knit and read" project.

I think whoever wrote the pattern up for the magazine was not familiar with writing up knitting patterns. Or it was specifically done wrong (???) to encourage people to order the kit.

First off, it says to cast on 35 sts. That is too few to make a nice wide scarf like the one pictured (unless the model is tiny-tiny, which is probably true too). A Knitlister last year commented that it looked like there were 45 "bumps" in the garter stitches, indicating that casting on 45 sts was better.

So I did that. I do hope I'll have enough yarn, I think one of the colors I have was discontinued last year.

Also, the pattern says to "knit 25 rows" and to do that as 15 blocks (8 of one color and 7 of the other) for an 8 foot scarf.

Now, I know I knit a bit tighter than some, but 15 blocks of 25 rows each will not give an 8 foot scarf. And 25 rows gives a block nowhere near as wide as the one in the picture.

So I think they meant "25 garter stitch ridges" or 50 rows. At any rate, that's what I'm gonna try.

If I have to, I can do the scarf with 6 blocks of of one color and 5 of the other instead of 8 and 7 as suggested. I did buy a bit more yarn than recommended (they said 3, 50 gram balls of each color and I bought two roughly-100 gram balls of NatureSpun worsted for each color).

I hope the hat pattern in this month's issue isn't as messed up. I decided to try out Knit Picks (have heard good things about them and if they are like Connecting Threads - the quilting "arm" of the same company - customer service should be excellent) and I ordered some Waterspun Weekend for the hat (the pattern suggests Baby but the WW was cheaper and I had been wanting to try it out). I got the color called "Mulberry".

It's really odd - now that I live in a warmer climate, where scarves and hats are needed much less of the year, I find myself driven to make lots of them.

Eventually, I want to get some kind of a rack or pegboard to put up in my entryway to hang my scarves on it - partly for storage but mainly for decoration.