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).