The skein of the blue thread

Once upon a time, the wonderful spinner Eilonwy, of http://www.project-cat.blogspot.com/

fame, sent me a box of yarn she had spun. One of the skeins was an innocent looking skein of mixed fibers plyed with blue sewing thread. Little did I know what I was getting myself into.

I began to knit. And the skein kept going ..

and going

and going

And going.

(I'll skip the next 5 pictures and get right on to the end...)

Until finally, the skein was finished...

Pictures

(the scarf in it's suitcase-y home)
Victoria and I unrolled the entire scarf last sunday. I'll start posting the pictures soon. They all overlap so you can get a sense of the entire, multi-colored monster.

how it all began

once upon a time, there was a box of yarn... That box of yarn -->

the box was a happy box. it was full of soft, squishy, colorful yarn. the box knew that it was a good box, full of cardboard-y virtue. and yarn. the box had recently been moved from the old home, where it sat in a crowded room full of crafty things, to the new home where it... sat in a room full of crafty things.

but the box was content to sit and be full of yarn. little did it know that discontent was brewing outside its corrugated confines. for there was one in the new home that did not approve of happy boxes being full of soft, squishy, colorful yarn. there was one who saw the box as representing the worst of hording and waste. this one was the owner's boy-type-person.

the owner was nice. she filled the box with yarn and let it sit, contented in it's fullness. the boy-type-person did not fill it. but, the boy-type-person had moved it from the old home to the new home and so the box thought of him as useful, but not very important. but the boy-type-person thought about the box. he thought about the all the soft, squishy, colorful yarn just sitting in the box. he thought about the money that had been spent filling the box with the soft, squishy yarn. he thought about the space the box took up. and it was bad in his sight. so he decided to do something about it.

so it was that the boy-type-person issued a challenge: if the owner would use all the yarn in the box in a single scarf he would refill the box for her with any yarn of her choosing. then came the crazy ideas. the boy-type-person was of the opinion that the resulting scarf would be the longest scarf in the world. but how long was that? thanks to the miraculous cha-cha information retrieving organization the answer arrived... the longest scarf in the world made by a single person in one long stream of knitwear was 3,523 feet long!

but the owner was not dissuaded. she had faith in the capacity of the box. and in the capacity of her friends who had boxes of their own. and so the scarf was begun on an afternoon in June with Brown Sheep Co.'s Shepherd Worsted in Persian Peacock (the owner's favorite yarn).

intro

I, sara, being of soundish mind and body do hereby invest this blog with a purpose, namely and to wit, chronicling my efforts at knitting the longest, continuous scarf, knit by a single person. this is not, I repeate, NOT yet an official world record attempt. I need to get a bit further along before I submit all the paperwork to the folks at Guinness.
to the best of my knowledge, the current record is 3,523 feet, held by Ray Ettinger. This effort began on June 4, 2008. the scarf is 25 stitches across and is being knit on size 10.5 needles. (it started on size 10 straights but then I switched to the 10.5 circular needles because they were easier to stuff into a bag). the scarf is being knit with any yarn I happen to come across. it started with my stash and has expanded to donated yarn, estate yarn, and practice handspun yarn.
the first few entries in this blog will be the origin myth of the scarf, followed by entries from the paper journal I've been keeping. Then, hopefully soon, we'll get into real time entries.

and just for fun... the box of yarn that started it all...