Scarf mission accomplished

Don’t feel fooled by my glazed eyes or jaw-cracking yawns — I am absolutely ecstatic to report that the scarves are finished. Nestled inside spirited gift bags with spirited tissue paper, they’re waiting in JG’s classroom until the end of the day, when his volleyball team will play the last home game of the year, the seniors will be recognized, and the scarves will go home with them. I wish I could be there to see it. Instead, I’ll be at work, struggling to keep my head off my desk. It’s a shame, really.

As much as I enjoy knitting, making nine scarves in nine weeks was a little more than I could handle gracefully. At one point last night/this morning, when I was fishing out finished scarves to tassel, I was struck with the delusional fear that I had only made eight scarves and was still bound to make a whole new one. In another dim moment, the sheer fatigue of doggedly cutting almost 300 tassels rendered my fingers unusable and numb. I switched to tying them for a change of motor movement, but the panic was there. I am only tassel-ing Scarf #3 right now. I’m not even two-thirds of the way done! How can I get through all of it before dawn?

Luckily, the panic passed and I finished everything as efficiently as I could have managed. In the future, I will definitely knit some “reserve scarves” in the off-season so as to offset the mad rush and I will refrain from doing all of the tassels at once. Although a satisfying task, it is 90% tedium and 10% gratification, the latter of which may be overestimated. For now, though, I’m taking a break from knitting so I can soak my head in some good reading. No knitting until ’08, I say.

Ultimately, I’m really happy to be able to provide the scarves to the girls. I’m not able to go to as many games as I would like, so I hope that the gift is meaningful and they will use and enjoy it at least over the next year. When I first decided to make scarves, I set out to forge a new tradition, but next year, the goal is to to break the part of the tradition that includes losing sleep.

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Crunch-Timetable (denotes end times for the following activities)

• Knitting: 11:23pm
• Cutting and tying tassels: 2:21am
• Packing into gift bags and adding tissue paper: 2:45am
• Being awake: 2:52am

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The Numbers

• Yarn used: About 19 skeins or 3,192 yards
  OR almost 32 football field lengths
  OR 1.8 miles
• Length of scarves knitted: 18 yards (about 6 feet per scarf — these are tall girls!)
• Tassels cut and tied: 288
• Knitting hours: Estimated at 12 hours per scarf or 4.5 straight days
• Blisters developed: 1
• Hours of sleep obtained last night: 3