I don’t have a scarf. Well–there’s a lime green muffler that was mine about 7 or 8 years ago. It matched with my teal polarfleece jacket. But it’s store bought (a quality I developed an aversion to right around when I became a fiber snob), about 3 feet wide (I’m exaggerating, but only a little), and a color of such short fashionability that it could be used to absolutely date an archaeological deposit.

There’s also a scarf in the closet that belongs to whoever needs it. It’s handknit, but handknit in teal heather when I still got all my patterns out of Kids Knitting.

How sad is that? I have enough hats to last an Antartic winter, but no proper scarf. Scarf season is winding to a close here in the Land of Eternal Summer, but winter will come around again next year.

I hope.

Assuming that, I need a scarf. I have the yarn picked out: a nice fuzzy gray worsted that a dear friend brought me back from Quito. There’s no fiber content info on the label, but I suppose I could try Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s burn test (in this book) if I really wanted to know what it was.

The pattern is less certain. I really adore the cowl pattern in Knit Two Together, but the fuzzy presence of the Lime and Teal scarves in the hall closet makes me think I should do someting basic and classic. Something that won’t be keeping the other scarves company in the closet in a few seasons.

Ribbing is unbelievably classic. Fall-asleep-while-you-knit classic. Cables are also nice, but I have reservations about knitting cables. They’re fiddly. Knitty, usually an excellent source of inspiration, has proved to be too specific in the scarf department.

I know–I already have Quant going, plus a gift knit, and adding a scarf to the needles would push me back to where I was here. There is also that minor detail called school. But there is something about waiting for the bus in the early morning chill that makes me dream scarves…