Purple-licious

When searching for Christmas idea's for my baby sister, my dad told me that she liked purple.  My mom kept telling me how she liked "gaudy" things, and was into fashion.

My first instinct was to get her a Riot Outfitter's Purple Diamond Weave Gel Shell iPod case (how's that for a shout-out?) for the iPod my parents got her for Christmas. While it's a really nice case, and 100% made in the USA, I didn't feel it would really excite her for Christmas.  It was just a nice accessory for the iPod. 

Later that day I found myself at a local yarn store, Yarn Barn, to check it out.  Maren had talked about going there, so I wanted to see if they had a better selection of stuff than Michael's had.  While it was a tiny store, they had so many different textures and fibers -- I couldn't resist.

On a table near the front of the store, I spied this purple and blue, shiny, fuzzy, lightweight yarn.  It was gaudy, and purple, perfect!  I found a complementary solid purple yarn, and continued shopping for other various potential projects.

When I got home, I read in my knitting book that what I had bought were hanks of yarn, and there was a special procedure of turning them into a ball so that they would be useable.  Well, I ignored these instructions and decided I could just unravel it in my lap instead of putting it over the back of a chair.  Oops.  All of this beautifully hand dyed yarn was now a tangled mess, and well, my cat enjoyed it.  I sat there for a few hours pulling, and tugging, trying to un-tangle it so I could put it into a ball.  As I was doing this, I was on the phone with my mom.  I told her about the iPod case I bought, and she then told me that my sister's favorite color was pink, and not purple.  My heart sank because well, I spent a *pretty* penny on those yarns, but I didn't care because they seemed just so perfect!

Once that fiasco was done and over with, and my mom assured me that she still likes purple (just not as much as pink), I decided I needed to acquire some larger needles if I wanted to make that yarn stretch into a decent size scarf.  I went across the street to JoAnn's and found some Clover US 17 bamboo needles.

My challenge for this scarf was to NOT drop stitches, and to NOT have any yarn overs.  I also wanted to carry the colors up the edges because I felt it would be wasteful of this "definitely not cheap" yarn.  I'm proud of the results, and it taught me to keep track of rows so that way the strips would be even.  When I was done, I really appreciated the different yarns.  I made mention to Brendan about wanting to keep it for myself... and he told me that it would suit my 12 year old sister MUCH better.  In hind sight, he was probably right.