Whistle WHile You Work

or, actually, listen to "The Ruby in the Smoke" by Phillip Pullman and watch videos on www.threadbanger.com
The scarf continues to grow slowly. i'm working in a chunky, varigated wool blend in greens and browns. i'm planning another measuring day. at the moment the scarf is taking up a large amount of the boy's staircase. more pictures soon!

New Fraction

The scarf is now 1/8th of the way there! The official length count as of tonight is 507.6 feet.

In other news: the cat decided to um... help me sort the yarn. Yeah, that's it, sort the yarn! This led to all the yarn sitting on the table waiting to become part of the scarf getting impressively tangled. The end result of that was 2 hours of ball winding and some truly interesting color combinations coming out of the resulting mystery ball. I'm down to the last of that little ball and then onto some yarn that eilonwy sent me.
I've also decided to work on the Ships Project this month. This project gets handmade hats and slippers and scarves to military personnel overseas. So far I've gotten two hats done and I hope to have at least 3 or 4 more done by the next ship date in January. I got most of the second hat knitted tonight while we went to see "The Fantastic Mr. Fox," which was entertaining, but not quite what I expected.

Reorganization

I have remeasured and retagged the entire scarf. The paperclip method was ingenious, but flawed. The paperclips tended to snag on later portions of the scarf and lead to grief and angst. Now I am using yardsale tags with the length written on them.

Also, now that the scarf is so long I remeasured it into 10ft increments and wound it around a dowel in order to give the whole scarf sushi roll some stability. The scarf is now a double decker object! it was starting to take up a bit too much floor space.

The rerolling was, in part, determined by the fact that when the scarf went on a field trip to the Ross Bridge Civil War craft festival it came apart a bit.

The scarf is now longer than City Federal by a good 50 feet!!!!

At last measurment it was 370ft and is almost 380 now.

Here are some pictures of the scarf at my booth:

Kitten of Approval

The scarf is now coiled up on the boy-type-person's balcony floor with the working end tossed over the railing. The cat has decided that this is the best thing ever...

Hearts & Flowers

Funny knitting story before we get to the scarf info:
Last night I went to see the Pink Box Burlesque do their "Big Top" charity show. The proceeds went to the The Elephant Sanctuary and the Children's Craniofacial Association. I was sitting in
the second row working on a hat for one of the performers who happens to be a dear friend. When the emcee took the stage she pointed me out and asked if I could possibly whip her up some pasties. I, of course, said no problem. I would like you to know that by the end of that show I had a lovely hat to had over to my friend, Miss Ducky, and a damn fine pair of knitted, tassled pasties made with Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted in the colorway "Aslan." It's so important to keep one's nipples warm don't you think?

I decided after January that I enjoyed doing theme knitting
so all the February knitting has been in holiday appropriate colors (where else am I going to use fuzzy pink yarn?).


February has seen significantly less knitting than January now that the scarf is permanently at Drew's. I've been doing more reading and less t.v. watching, which leads to less knitting.

Prior to watching "Dollhouse" tonight the scarf was just over 3388 inches (282.333 feet). For scale: the Flatiron Building in New York is 285 feet.

The pink and purple yarns are all from donations and so I haven't got a clue what company most of them are from. But here are a few closeups:








This is an almost popcorn-y yarn that Sally and Barbara from Tuscaloosa brought me. It's very stiff when knitted up on these needles.











Below that you can see a fun fur in purples and pinks. Also from Sally and Barbara. I know Ellen was selling this stuff when I first started working at Serendipity, but I have no recollection of brand name.



This yarn was a ribbon- type also from Barbara and Sally.
















I'm reasonably certain that this is an alpaca-blend and I think I got it from one of the lovely ladies at Knit Nouveau. It's so soft. I love alpaca. Not, however, as much as I love angora. And I hear that there's a bunny in the area that needs a haircut. I may have to see what I can do about getting in on that.












This is a pink DK weight wool. It was nice to work with but as per usual with this stuff does not have a label or a clear donor. I know it came in one of the bags I got recently, but I can't remember which one.









This last yarn is very, very soft and very very synthetic. It came from Barbara and Sally and I'm fairly positive that they got it at Serendipity a few years back, but I don't know the brand name as per usual.

From the beginning

I have decided to take my scarf notebook and type it into this blog. I'm backdating all the entries so that they are listed on the day that they were actually written. The day the scarf began was June 5, 2008 if anyone wants to jump back and read about it from the start.

Eris

There is going to be a bit of a change in the scarf. I'm not quite done with the yarn Eilonwy
sent me. However, yesterday my cat, Eris, was killed.


She got out of the house and was killed by some dogs living in a nearby yard.
In her honor all the yarn going into the scarf for the month of January is going to be black or white. I miss her very much.

Christmas update

At last measurement the scarf was 238.875 ft. That is 5.97% of the goal. Work has slowed some now that the scarf is permanently at Drew's house. However I did get a few feet done while watching movies this week. And I managed to get a couple of pictures!
I'm still working with handspun from Eilonwy.

Here we have (if i'm reading her yarn key correctly) is soy silk and merino with a little soy/cashmere blended into it early on. The merino is from a pound of purple and pink roving that I sent her.











I'll take this directly from the key... "ball o' orange based mixed colors. This is an early yarn, recently re-found. It's the same fiber ysed in skeins I sent before, but those were plied with green or orange and this is plied on itself."

field trip

This weekend was exhausting! My Dad, my aunt, and her partner came to help me turn my messy storage facility into a real, grown-up house. Shirley got the yard cleaned up and ready for landscaping in the spring. Dad and I retrieved the family heirloom dining table from Tuscaloosa. And Aunt Francis arranged things and redid my closets. I finally have a living room and a dining room. I even got some work done on the scarf while they were here and finished two skeins of browny/burgandy yarn from Eilonwy.
The scarf went on a field trip today to Serendipity Needleworks. Ellen, the lovely proprietress got a picture of some of the scarf out if its suitcase. Hopefully I'll be able to snag a copy and post it for you.
I'm still working through yarn from Eilonwy over at Project Cat. She's a spinning demon. She is also the origin of the blue thread yarn that wouldn't stop. At the moment I'm working with a lime green and purple wool. I just finished a yummy mohair in blues and purples.
While I was at Serendipity I got myself and a friend some beautiful yarn from Lorna's Laces in greens, pinks, and brown. It's a custom yarn for Serendipity named after a friend of ours who passed away last year due to breast cancer. The proceeds from the yarn go to breast cancer research.
I was also naughty and got a lovely needlepoint canvas. It's a bowl of seashells and coral. It's going to become a hanging for my living room, which has an aquatic theme. It's my holiday present to myself. I'll try to post pictures soon. My camera is out of batteries and my charger isn't charging for some reason.

And now for some stats:
The scarf is now 2624.5 inches, or, 218.7 feet.
This is 5.5% of the total goal.
This is 17.5% of the height of the Empire State Building (not counting the antenna)
The completed scarf (4000 ft) will be 32.2% of the height of Mt. Fuji.
The scarf is now 39.7 ft taller than the statue of Vulcan (with base) on Red Mountain in Birmingham.

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...

Friday the 13th

Friday the 13th and I just watched "The 13th Warrior" with Drew.
I've finished the Lorna's Laces,
done a skein of Linie 73-Spot
(yarn 18) in teal,







a ball of Berroco Plush Colors (yarn 19) in kiwi,










and started a ball of violet mystery wool (yarn 20). I think I may have gotten the wool to make a stuffed penguin. I know the teal yarn was purchased at Serendipity because it was sparkley and teal (one of my favorite colors). The lime was probably intended for a baby toy of some description. I probably should have saved it as I do have baby knitting in the offing, but new yarn is always better and I think I shall make a blanket, which this wouldn't really do for anyway. I've also got to make a wedding shawl for Lindsay and a DNA scarf for Sam. Or something else suitably medical.
On the bright side, I chew my fingers less when I'm knitting. I probably won't get much done tomorrow. I've got work and then Drew and I are going to "The Count of Monte Cristo" at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. I'll knit if I can get him to drive.

Day 7

260 inches

I finished the mystery ball and have started the first full skein (yarn 17) in the scarf. It's a skein of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted in Sand Dune. I bought two skeins to do a set of knee socks, but I didn't like the shape once I started knitting so into the scarf it went.

Last night I went up to Drew's balcony and let the whole thing unroll onto the floor below. It made a really satisfying "whomp." Then I stretched it from the arm of the couch to the upstairs bathroom door, went downstairs and knitted from there. I'm looking forward to storing it upstairs and knitting downstairs.
I've promised Drew that when it's all done he can have it as a bean bag chair.
I had a lovely conversation with two customers at work about it. It's a no-stress project, which I need desperately right now. The beauty of this project is that it's got a definate goal and end point, but the amount of time it takes to get there or even if I do get there is irrelevant. In the current haze of mom/house/work that makes me very happy.

Day 6

Well, standing in line at the DMV got me through the rest of the blue velvet and onto a small section of black wool (yarn 12) from Brown Sheep.
This afternoon and my lunch break saw some pink cotton and viscose (yarn 13) from my teddy bear phase as well as a segment of black chenille (yarn 14), whose origin and history are an utter blank. My break got me through that yarn and onto a small segment of dark grey Blue Sky Alpaca (yarn 15) left over from a scarf. After that will be some white cotton (yarn 16) that I used in a baby blanket.


The scarf sausage is starting to get too big to fit in my bag. I"ll have to upgrade it soon.
238.25 inches

Day 5

165 inches

Day 4 contd again

136 inches.
I started the next yarn in the mystery ball (yarn 11) It's a blue velvet that I've had for decades.

If I remember correctly, I got it when KnitOne closed in the mid '90's. It, like the sari silk, had been worked up and I took it apart to add to the scarf. I finished the cotton and started on the velvet while watching "The Big Sleep," which was about five different shades of awesome. It's my first Chandler. It was interesting comparing it to "The Maltese Falcon," which I've listened to as and audio book.
Kniting-wise, Drew and I rounded the end goal up to 50,000 inches for math's sake and calculated that it would take approximately 1,000 days at my present rate. Granted thta I don't expect to keep this rate up, I thought of Shannon Hale's "Book of a Thousand Days." I like having something in common with that heroine even if it is just a number.

Day 4 contd

Done with the sari silk. Now it's on to the mystery ball. I reorganized my stash box last night and this ball of yarn is made up of a bunch of different yarns that were in disarray and mostly weren't big enough to wind into their own balls. It starts off with (yarnd 8) some purple cotton and viscose that was left over from a series of teddy bears that I made.
Then it moves on to (yarns 9 & 10) two different colors of Blue Sky cotton that I had been making a hat with.
I didn't have quite enough yarn to finish the hat though, so I pulled it out and added the yarn to the scarf project.

I've just measured and added markers at 50 inch intervals. The scarf is now 104 inches. It makes a fat little bolster pillow when rolled up, but still fits conveniently in my bag. I like this project. It gives me a stress-free goal to work toward, unlike all my Mom-related goals.