Ellen: Yes, I am originally from Hudson, Ohio. (My folks live in central Illinois now: long story short - my dad took early retirement from one university post and then took a different one). I haven't been back to Hudson in 20 years. The only yarn shop I remember, I remember as being kind of stuck-up (they actually REFUSED to sell me two balls of yarn out of a lot for a project, and rolled their eyes when I told them what the project was. I'm sure part of it was that I was a young teenager at the time). I bet the one you saw is a different shop, though - the one I remember was uber-traditional and would never deign to have "funky" in their name.

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I'm actually thinking now of starting a different Potter-themed project (though may STILL start the Invisibility Cloak). I found a pattern that I printed out quite a while back that was an "inspired by" scarf - inspired by one Remus Lupin (played by David Thewlis) in the third movie. (Pattern is here, and I may print off a new copy because it looks like the author has made it more easily readable than my copy).

I will admit to having a wee bit of a literary crush on Lupin, at least as Thewlis played him in the movie, and so I would like a version of the scarf.

The author of the pattern (first name is "Dale" so I am not making any assumptions about gender) noted that the scarf is at best a recreation, because the scarf from the movie was a dark charcoal color and was hard to see.

I have (not quite enough, possibly, but there's a way to modify the pattern to make a shorter scarf) nice brown "Country Silk" by Cleckheaton - which is a very nice yarn (I used it for the pink Clapotis I made).

I've said before how, though I'm maybe a bit disinterested in the more raving sorts of fandom - I doubt I'd ever dress up as a favorite character EXCEPT maybe for Halloween or if there were a big costume party I was invited to - I kind of like that there is this whole underground movement of people out there doing stuff like this: writing patterns for scarves resembling the ones the Hobbits wore in the LOTR movies, making up stuff to correspond to Harry Potter, all of the Nintendo-themed stuff (on Ravelry there's a really wonderful afghan made of solid-color granny squares, done of Mario in his raccoon-form. And it's not just an afghan, it's done in the "outline shape" of Mario (if you're a Ravelry member, you can see it here).

In a way, these things are kind of like fan fiction, but by needlecrafters.

(And yeah, I know, a lot of people malign fan fiction and some of it is poorly done. And I'm not crazy about the idea of some of the types of fiction where the characters are taken to, um, "places," where they otherwise probably wouldn't go...those of you who know a bit about fan fiction probably know what I'm euphemistically getting at here)

And realistically, no one will know when the scarf is done what its inspiration was. But I'll know. And just like I once described the fluffy blue scarf I made as containing some kind of "sympathetic magic" (because one of the yarns in it was named "George Bailey," after what I consider to be one of my big personal heroes among movie characters), I'll feel maybe a little more comforted with this scarf around my neck, seeing it as a touchstone to a movie series that I enjoy and that I can use as a sort of an escape.