Last week I wrote about all the things that one might do when forced to stay at home for four days due to a dangerous ice storm.  Though I might have benefitted from matching single socks, mastering the folding of fitted sheets, or rounding up all of my resident dust bunnies, I did none of these things.  Once I got home from school last Monday afternoon and realized I would have the gift of staying put for a few days, I decided that this was the universe giving me the gift of time to knit.  So, while many were making their way to the grocery store to assure that they and their families would be well-fed during the storm, my thoughts turned to what I was going to make.  I finished a cowl a few days earlier, just in time for our winter weather, and had nothing on my needles.

I have a yarn stash such that if I should live to be a hundred, I would likely never use it all.  The problem with deciding on a project is that I needed to find a pattern, hope that I had a yarn that would work, and then pray that I had enough yardage for the pattern.

One night early in January, while wasting time scrolling through the tons of email ads I get every day,  I had seen a scarf kit that I really liked.  It caught my eye, but I let it go because I had made a deal with myself that I was not going to buy anything except essentials during the month of January.  Some people honor “dry-January.”  For me, since dry is my way of life, it was “no-buy January.”  The Monday of the ice storm was January 31st.  As I thought about what I wanted to make, the memory of that scarf floated back into my conscience.  Obviously I didn’t have time to order the kit if I wanted to begin work on a project ASAP, but sometimes you can buy just the pattern for things sold in kits.  But there were still nine hours left in the month of January.  If I wanted to keep my promise to myself, I’d have to wait until the next morning, February 1, to buy the pattern.  Faced with this moral dilemma, I tempted fate and my will power and went to the website to see if I could order just the pattern.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that this pattern that I wanted was a free download!!!  Yep.  Another sign that the universe was rooting for me and I should indeed knit away the days of bad weather.

Once I downloaded the pattern, I was able to see what the yarn requirements were. The pattern was written by a yarn manufacturer to be used with their yarns.  (I suspect the pattern was free because the intended yarns for the pattern are on the pricey side.). I first had to look up the gauge and yardage of the suggested yarns.  Then I began “shopping” in my stash.  I needed 490 yards of sock weight yarn in the main color and five “mini-skeins” in five contrasting colors.  Seems simple when you have a ton of yarn in your stash, right?  It was harder than I thought it would be to find what I needed.

I have a lot of sock yarn, but not much that is a solid color and the standard yardage for a ball of sock yarn is 460 yards, thirty yards shy of what I needed for my scarf pattern.  I found a 467 yarn skein of off-white, slightly less yardage than I needed, in a mitten kit.  I pilfered that knowing that I could easily replace it when/if I get to making those mittens.  Then to find the contrasting colors, colors that worked together and were all the right weight of yarn.  I don’t buy mini-skeins “on speck” because it is almost certain that you wont have enough yarn for whatever you eventually want to make with them.  I was a little concerned that I wouldn’t have what I needed.

As I started digging through my yarn bins, I came across a bag with three mini-skeins that a friend had bought me while on a business trip in Denver.  This is where the friends with benefits part comes in!  My friend knows nothing about knitting himself, but travels a lot for business, enjoys shopping, and treats his friends well!  Not knowing what to buy, he took the advice of the knit shop staff and bought the three small skeins for me.  They are beautiful yarn!  But at the time he gave them to me, I had no idea what I was going to do with them.  What I did know is that whatever I made with them would have a great story!  They sat for several years while the plot of their story bubbled to the surface.  The next chapter of that story is that they were exactly the right kind of yarn for what I needed!  I dug a little more in my stash and found two more colors that would work well in the color palette that had been dictated by the yarn from my friend.

By 6:30 on Monday night, I had a pattern, all my necessary supplies, and I was ready to settle in and make myself a scarf!

For the next four days I knit, completing all of the scarf except the edge finishing, which I discovered I did not have a long enough knitting needle to do.  It was  late at night when I made this discovery so turned to Amazon.  My new, very long, needle was waiting for me when I got home from school on that next Monday.  Monday night I was determined to pick up the 785 stitches around the edge of the scarf and get it done, which I did.  All that was then left to do was weave in all of the ends; I did that on Tuesday night while watching the State of the Union Address.

Wednesday I photographed the scarf.

The words in this post tell the story of this scarf.  More importantly for me, however, the real story rests in each stitch of the scarf itself.  I know which “chapters” were knit on which days.  I know how the “characters” were developed.  I know the “conflict and resolution” that make up the plot.  When I wear this scarf, I become a part of its continuing tale.

Everything that I knit has such a story.  I buy yarn when I travel.  It’s a great souvenir.  That is the first chapter of the tale of whatever I make with it.  Or, as is the case with this scarf, friends give me the gift of yarn, making the beginning of the story even sweeter.  Socks that are knit on trains or planes and blankets knit in hospital waiting rooms all carry with them a unique journey.  Things knit while in the company of friends are filled with an extra dose of  joy and laughter.

It is not the knitted objects  themselves that are most important, but the memories they hold, the emotions that are stitched into them, and the life that continues to live on through them.

Thanks for the yarn, Jim!  You are the best friend with the best benefits!