Near the beginning of August, just as I was thinking I was going to
let the listing expire without getting an order to knit a Fourth Doctor
scarf, another order came in. This one was my first overseas Etsy order
(Germany!) and came with the (totally valid) request to change the
purple colour I traditionally use from a less red purple to a more
purple purple. Which is valid. The colour I use isn’t actually the best
and I think I might like the purple I used for this scarf better. The
buyer was lovely in looking on the Knit Picks site and picking out the
colour she wanted and the whole process was very painless and yielded a
lovely scarf.
Because I’m not the sort of person who likes having a ton of random
scrap yarns around, I dug out all the Knit Picks WoTA worsted
(fortunately I keep it all in one bag) from the previous full WoTA
worsted scarf, took out my trusty yarn scale, weighed what I had, and
then adjusted the ratio of how much to purchase.The one concern I had
was that I had no idea how close KP matches colours between dye lots, as
I was clearly using yarn I’d purchased a year ago and expected the dye
lots to be drastically different. Good news…they weren’t. Even in the
sections of the scarf where I *know* I joined a ball of the old colour
to a ball of the new colour mid-section, I cannot even tell the
slightest colour difference. I wouldn’t put 100% faith on this working
all the time, but it worked out this time and I’ll probably take this
gamble again.
The only real problem is that even though I made sure that when I
ordered, the total amount of each colour I ended up with was greater
than what was recommended on the pattern, but I still ran out of red,
grey, and tan just before the end of the scarf. This put me a little bit
behind schedule because I was on vacation when this happened and even
though I ordered more yarn (from Ravelry destash and some from Knit
Picks), I had to wait until I got back home to get to finishing the last
quarter of the scarf. Fortunately, the buyer is a knitter as well, so
they were very understanding about the slight delay and were perfectly
lovely about everything, even when the package got stuck in customs in
Berlin for a week and they had to call and take care of all of those
problems.
Overall, this is the scarf I’m the most happy with since the first
WoTA scarf (which I got to see “in the wild” at the end of August, as I
saw the person I made it for and she was wearing it. It’s wearing well
and looked great even a year later!) I made, thus reinforcing my new
policy of only making scarves in WoTA (or Cascade 220 if a person wants
superwash) because it is the best yarn I’ve used for this process. Plus,
because I have a new yarn scale and did a better job of monitoring how
much yarn I had at the start and end, I have a WAY better estimate of
how much of each colour I actually need for the scarf, so maybe the next
time I open the listing up (might be a while…I knit this and then
immediately knit a stockinette scarf in the round, so I have garter
stitch burnout right now), I might not actually have to reorder yarn two
times to get to the end.
Here’s a photo of the finished scarf. It’s pretty beautiful. Almost
all credit to Knit Picks Wool of the Andes for being such a great yarn
for this project.
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