Start of Ene's Scarf

I'm sick. I have an ear, nose, throat, infection and a nasty cough. This is the first ear infection I've ever had in my sixty year life. I don't ever want another one.

It hurts, I can't hear, and can barely think, and the beautiful month of May is a rotten time to be sick. I did go to the doctor on Saturday, so hopefully the drugs are working and things will be back to normal soon. In the meantime, I decided being sick was the perfect excuse to knit on something new instead of the two projects I should be finishing.

This is Ene's Scarf, designed by Nancy Bush and published in Scarf Style. It's a charted pattern and easy to follow from the charts.

The pattern calls for a size 6 32" or longer circular needle. All I had was a 24" and it's working fine.

The yarn is Knitpicks Alpaca Cloud, a lace weight 100% baby alpaca, in color Horizon. So far the yarn gets an A+. It's soft, it's pretty, it knits smoothly. I wound 100g/880 yards of it into balls and never found a knot.

If I wasn't sick there wouldn't be time in May to sit for hours and hours doing tedious stitch counting on a lace scarf knit with very fine yarn. Unfortunately, with the stress of the pain and the coughing my brain isn't working as well as it might, so I've also been doing tedious tinking back. But I do think the cast on and the first five rows are correctly done now. With the pattern established, it's getting easier to see mistakes soon after I make them.

This is the first time I've knit with lace weight yarn and the first time I've knit a triangular shaped garment starting at the longest end. Ene's cast on is even longer than the longest side - the cast on is all the stitches on the border of the two sides of the V. 375 stitches.

I think I like knitting the endless, long rows while the project is still fresh and interesting. By the time I'm bored with it, the rows will be getting shorter and shorter until suddenly the scarf is done.