WIP: Wayfarer Scarf

Last week after I realized that my yarn was too skinny to keep on working on my current lazy scarf project, I had a fit of stash lust and grabbed some yarn that had been siren calling me for the last year or so: Brooklyn Tweed Shelter in colorway Thistle, a staggeringly beautiful shade of deep purple.  I had, luckily, bought a pattern to go along with my yarn, so I already knew what it wanted to be.

I cast on Thursday night.  The beginning was a little rough, but soon I was knitting away happily.  Then I hit the traveling stitch pattern, which threw me for a minute because I ended up wanting to change the increases a bit - but then that hiccup was resolved, too, and I'm left with miles of brainless garter and slipped stitch pattern to knit with what has to be the sheepiest, fluffiest, most beautiful wool ever to grace this planet.

Sometimes I worry that I've given in to some kinds of hype, because a lot of times I buy a yarn that I've been coveting deeply or have heard a lot about, and it ends up sitting in my stash for a bit before I get to knit with it.  In the meantime (sometimes years),  I'll buy a little more of it, because hey, I liked it the first time, right?  When I finally get to knitting the original yarn, I've amassed a little stashette of the stuff.  Usually, this ends in great happiness: I knit with the original yarn, and love it, and luckily there's more!  I haven't yet hit a bad yarn with this method, although I always get nervous that I'll absolutely hate something.

I had a near miss with Socks That Rock variegated sock yarn - as a new knitter, I had heard that this yarn was the best thing ever, so I bought a skein and tried knitting it up into a pair of Jaywalkers.  In the end I had to cast on like four times, and the stupid sock still didn't fit (as I found out way later, a problem with the pattern for my huge feet, not with the yarn) so I got disgusted with it, wound it back up and stuffed it back into the stash.  And then, for some mad reason, I kept on buying it.  Over four years or so, I accumulated five or six balls of the handpainted colorways, and every time I saw them in my stash I wondered what the hell I was thinking.

And then, one day about two years ago, I knit a pair of plain socks out of a colorway of STR that my mom had given to me.  And it was super nice - the colors were beautiful, the yarn was super soft and nice to work with, and the socks came out great.  And all of a sudden, what had seemed like a burden of too much sock yarn I wasn't sure I could work with, turned into a mini treasure chest.  All it took was a little time and a much better knitter than 18-year-old me.

Anyways.  The moral of that story is that Shelter is awesome.  I want to jump into a kiddie pool full of it.  And it will never, ever be a stash reject.