Knitting Interrupted

The Doctor Who scarf is finally finished. It is easily the largest thing I’ve ever knitted. It’s about 16 feet long and maybe 14 inches wide. There are 8 colors used in total and 48 color changes. All in garter stitch. This project challenged my fortitude, let me tell you.

Even the kids were glad I finished it.

So glad that it was impossible to get the image of it that I’d envisioned.

Maybe tomorrow. DH is going to wear it to work (I’ll get a photo of him on the way out the door), so I’ll have to try when he gets home. :-)

While I was finishing up the last three colors last night, I had a chance to reflect on my experience knitting this scarf. Here’s what I learned:

1. Always have more than one knit project on the needles. It’s very easy for enthusiasm to flag when faced with a large undertaking like this.
2. Spend a knitting session, or two, just focusing on weaving in the ends. It really would have sucked to have to weave them all in today. It was nice just having a few–it went quickly and I was really able to enjoy having finished this monster!
3. I don’t knit as fast as I thought I did. I mean, I reckoned myself a pretty speedy knitter since I was able to knock of small projects so quickly–a baby hat in a day, a pair of socks in a weekend, 2 pairs of Fetching in another weekend. Boy was I wrong. I figured last night that I was averaging about two and a half minutes per row. With 60 stitches in a row, that’s 24 stitches a minute. I guess that’s not too bad. Here’s some more math. There are 890 rows in this scarf so it took me around 37 knitting hours to complete. Sheesh, then why on earth was it on the needles that long? I’ll tell you why. If I had to knit for 37 hours straight on that thing (or even 8 hours a day for a week), then I probably would have strangled someone with it. Thank goodness for other WIPs!

Oh, I’m so thrilled. Now I can turn to other projects which have been waiting in the wings. Like this:

and this:

and this:

and, of course, these:

There are more photos, but I have so much yarn in my stash and I didn’t want to upset you low-bandwidth folks. Most of my yarn was purchased while Doctor Who was on the needles. I guess I was really craving some knitting variety.

PS–> Don’t forget to hit the gallery for images of stuff I’ve finished. :-)