Silly little thing

I maintain that people require a certain amount of silliness in their lives. (Well, I also maintain that people require a certain amount of cuteness in their life, but that's another essay for another time). Sometimes it's good just to be a little silly.

A couple weeks ago, when I was at the JoAnn's, I got to looking at the "scarf yarns." If you're a knitter, you've probably seen these - both the "serious" yarn shops I've been in this fall had them, and all of the craft shops that also carry yarn. It's a yarn that either has sort of an insertion-ribbon edging, or it is a big loose trellis-like construction. The idea is that you knit widely spaced stitches either into the insertion edging, or a few strands of the "trellis," and the scarf spontaneously forms a looser or tighter ruffle, depending on the yarn.

When I first saw them, I thought, "Meh, it's like those fun fur scarves of about 10 years ago. They'll be cool for a season and then most people will think they're lame."

But I got a closer look at the yarn. And I had a 40% off coupon. And it would be really cheap with the coupon. And so I decided: even if these things have the typical gnat's lifespan that fads have, it might be fun to try making one, just to see how it works up.

The one I got was Red Heart "Rigoletto" (there's probably a joke about the fickleness of women, or at least fashion, in there somewhere). It's one of the "prints" (apparently a new term for a multicolored colorway). The colorway is called "Majesty" - purples with tan.

It's not at all easy to figure out from the directions, even for an experienced knitter. I finally went with what instinct told me to do and got it more or less right. But this would, I think, be even less of a good introduction to knitting than the garter stitch Fun Fur scarves are. (I really think, depending on a person's patience level, that either a basic dishcloth or something like a watchcap would be preferable.)

But I finally got it done. And yeah, it's silly. And it probably will have a gnat's lifespan of being fashionable. But then again, out in the heartland, we don't always care about that (my mother still wears the red Fun Fur scarf I made for her 10 years ago. Though that might partly be because *I* made it for her.)

It's almost a bit like a feather boa, without the feathers. (Or, well, since it's "dinosaur fur" (acrylic) yarn, maybe proto-feathers. Though in truth, the Sinclair dino notwithstanding, petroleum actually formed from microorganisms, not dinosaurs. But thinking of acrylic yarn as "dinosaur pelts" is more romantic than thinking of it as "zooplankton pelts")

But it is warm, without being heavy. And it would work as both a keep-your-neck-warm scarf and as an accessory type of scarf:



And the color and the shape of the scarf (they call the pattern a "Rotini" scarf) made me think of someone:



"DARRRling. It's simply FABulous."

Heh. (I can get my natural hair to go into Rarity type curls if someone helps me set it when it's wet - I can't do the necessary combing. Usually when I'm up at my parents I let my mom set it for me into long curls because it looks better and is less unruly when I set it while wet. And I've never found a curler type of thing that works as a substitute, but I admit I'd kind of like to have the option of those type of curls all the time)

(Also, if you look closely at that shot, you can see the one thing Cary Grant and I share in common....the cleft in the chin. (Though fortunately mine is less pronounced))