Brainwave

I was walking home last night, thinking about my knitting. As I often do. And suddenly the solution to the grey fluffy scarf problem hit me. See, I'm making it with Kidsilk Haze, which is expensive (£6.50-ish, usually), and I only have the one ball. This would normally be fine, since a scarf just goes until you run out of yarn, and the yardage in the ball is fine.

But the pattern I'm making from VLT is one of the wide-bordered scarves, which means that once I do the first border and the bulk of the scarf, I still have to do another border. But I don't want leftover yarn! Fortunately, the Yarn Harlot outlined the perfect solution in Knitting Rules - you knit the second border separately and then attach it to the body of the scarf once you're down to the last little bit of yarn.

It's made slightly more complicated by the fact that I've rejigged the pattern. I wanted to knit it on an airplane, which meant plastic DPNs to get through security. Of course, the only ones I had were much bigger than the pattern calls for. It still looks really good IMHO, but it means that when I did the first border I only worked 3 repeats of the pattern instead of 7, and it's still the right width. So I had to modify the number of pattern repeats in the body of the scarf. And I'm going to have to graft the whole thing in garter stitch, which I've never done before. Lots of fun.

Still, I cast on for the second border last night, after successfully playing a quick round of "hunt the yarn end inside the ball". It's very quick, and I'm hoping that after trying 2 other projects, this one will be the right thing for granny-in-law's Christmas present.