It’s not what I’m supposed to be knitting…

It's not what I'm supposed to be knitting.  I really meant to swatch for Juliet.  Or, I was thinking I might pull my Manos Silk/Merino shrug off the needles and swatch for a different pattern — I was knitting it double stranded for the Anthropologie Shrug.  But, that muds up the colors too much, so I found a couple of interesting patterns I thought would work well and I need to swatch to see which is the best match for this yarn.  Hot Lava looked pretty good.  This basic pattern from Lion Brand looked pretty close to what I really wanted — something simple to set off the pretty yarn.  And then there was Amy King's Sprout, another simple pattern sure to set off my pretty yarn.  So, the point here is, I had stuff I was supposed to be doing.

But nonetheless, I'm suddenly obsessed with a scarf.  A scarf of all things.  I thought I had sworn off scarves after a flurry of scarf-making activity a few years back nearly did me in.

This one is sort of amorphous, but I'm very pleased with it so far.  The yarn is a a chunky baby alpaca from Misti.  I purchased several skeins of gray, along with some pink and a deep rich red, thinking I would make a scarf with long, horizontal stripes.  But, when I started the scarf, on the plane ride to Disneyworld, it seemed to have different ideas of its own.

I started with some offset garter ridge rows, and a simple yarn over pattern to create the eyelets. I had some vision of perhaps dyeing pink silk ribbon to run through the eyelets.  I picked it up tonight, and after a few more rows of garter, decided to do a wide rib, 5×5, all the way along the scarf until it was long enough to finish with another garter/eyelet border.

Again, the scarf had other plans.  Instead of the wide ribs, I've ended up with little 5 stitch by 5 row boxes (I'm sure there must be a technical knitter's term for this), which leaves me with almost a patchwork look.  It's hard to see in the picture, but it has nice texture and the scarf has a very structured, almost a gothic architectural look to it.

I'm torn between seeing how far the boxes want to go before they turns into something else or swatching for Juliet.  The relaxation of letting the yarn dictate what the scarf will become is irresistable.