Hello All!  My camera battery was in need of a good charge, so photos of Knitting in the Heartland goodies will have to wait.  Allow me to distract you with this post that was marinating in the drafts…

I have this thing with scarves.  Somehow, they’re hard for me.  First, there’s the difficulty of buying enough yarn.  Scarves are narrow, so I invariably underestimate how much yarn they use up.  Then, once the knitting starts, my interest wanes very quickly.  I get a potholder-sized piece knitted up and am ready for shaping something new and different, not the same thing for several feet more.  Add to that the fact that I have managed winters quite well with shawls and cowls, and it is not surprising that I haven’t knitted a scarf since 2009.

That’s about the time the Peaks Island Hood came out.  In my mind, a hooded scarf would be an entirely different knitting experience, and upon wearing it, I would be transported to the happy place of sartorial joy in which all Ysolda’s patterns seem to live.  At the beginning of this winter, I cast on.

This Elsebeth Lavold Calm Wool had been marinating in my stash since 2010.  I purchased it at Tuesday Morning, which sells high-end yarns in quantities that are never quite enough to complete the project you are envisioning.  In addition to the yardage, this yarn has camel and alpaca, making it too prickly for, say, an army of hats.

For whatever reason, the Peaks Island Hood has inspired shockingly vituperative comments.  These mostly seemed to be centered around the pattern’s lack of charts.  This in mind, I sat myself down one morning to work the pretty little shells at the edge, and by paying attention and using my mad reading skillz, I managed to not only survive the process but enjoy pushing my brain to make sense of a pattern it couldn’t see.  Pro tip, angry people: if you open up your pattern and the stitch pattern is not charted, you’re going to be knitting a pattern that isn’t charted.

There is a scarfy bit in the Peaks Island Hood, one where you’re knitting and knitting in seed stitch until you’re pretty sure it will never get any longer, at which point you arrive at the lovely little bells that wedge into the scarf and turn it into a hood.  I stalled a bit on the scarfy section, then gained momentum again after turning the scarf into a hood.

I would have been super proud of myself as remembered how to use that reading thing to get the shells right decreasing back down from the hood into the little end, except by that time it was February and starting to get warm.  People in yoga started asking me what I was making and I didn’t have any good reason for why I was knitting a scarf when it was warm enough to leave your coat in the car when you walked into the gym.  February became March, the weather kept warming, and by the time I got the whole thing blocked and the vintage buttons sewed on, I was starting to feel quite silly.

Until…

Scarf day.  Thank you, crazy Kansas weather.