I hopped in my friends' car and went down to Seattle last weekend for the Urban Craft Uprising (such a great crafts show!). Since I had the luxury of not doing the driving, I tossed a ball of yarn into my bag. I didn't actually think I'd finish making something out of it — it was, after all, a heat wave and I'd had the brilliance of choosing wool — so this scarf was like an added bonus to a really fun weekend.
I bought the handspun yarn from Yummy Yarn a few years ago at a Got Craft? show here in Vancouver. Over the months I've tried out several patterns in it, but none seemed to make the loveliness of the yarn shine. So of course the simplest of simple stitches ended up being the lucky ticket.
I've never liked double crochet; I think it's ugly. But I knew I had to make this one ball of yarn go as far as possible, and I doubted my beloved half-double would get me far enough (hdc uses almost as much yarn as dc, but the stitches are shorter). So I used my new favourite stitch: extended half double crochet. If my logic is correct, it uses the same amount of yarn as double crochet, but it doesn't end up looking like a tube, which is what I don't like about the far more common stitch. And it's a taller stitch, so I was confident I'd get at least enough length for a short scarf. For kicks, I worked the stitches between the stitches from the previous row, instead of into the top of the stitches (except for the two end stitches; I worked those directly into the first and last stitch from the previous row). I chained 17 for 15 stitches per row, and I used a 7mm hook. I like how the fabric turned out, and I'm even more in love with the yarn now.
Yippee!