Several years ago, my LYS (local yarn shop) decided to close its doors and had a massive clearance sale.

It was a dangerous time to be a knitter, let me tell you. Lots of pretty, pretty yarns at low, low prices. It was also just about the time that I was really getting into knitting (again), and having moved past dog sweaters (well, moved past just dog sweaters), I was looking for yarns that I could craft into things for me. I think at one point I might have been making almost daily trips to the store, which actually made it slightly more palatable to my pocketbook since my purchases were broken into smaller, less scary totals.

The problem with clearance sales (besides the damage to the pocketbook) is that you get what you get. Which in my case meant one or two skeins of a yarn, which, in reality, is not quite enough to do much of anything with except make scarves. But, luckily, I discovered that scarves make really good accessories to keep you warm in the winter. Go figure.

The scarf below was finally finished last night, after being on needles for an extraordinary amount of time. And when I say extraordinary, I mean years. Really. It wasn’t that it was complicated (although it is done on tiny needles), it was that it was my “between projects” scarf. But with my dog sweater orders (yes, I did improve on my original sweater for Paco), my wedding shawl (which I sadly never wore on my wedding day), and Abby’s mobile, there wasn’t much “between” time and this scarf only got a few hours of love every year. It is the Show-Off Scarf, although I realized quite early on that with only one skein of yarn, it would never be a full-sized scarf. So I added a little button hole so that I could thread the end of the scarf through and avoid the need to wrap it around itself and waste valuable and precious length.

And no, I was not naked in that picture. I was wearing a tank top that got cropped out of the picture.

On the right, is the shelving unit in our family room which also houses my yarn stash. See the six wicker baskets? Five of those are full of yarn. Full. But that’s not the extent of it. See the large brown bag in the upper right? Several balls of yarn in there (and two other projects that are on the go – one new “between projects” scarf and a clapotis). The white plastic bag near the bottom? Holds about six more balls of yarn. There are three or so balls on the shelf next to the brown bag, a few more small balls in a basket on top of the shelves (out of the picture) and there are also a few balls of yarn in our dining room and in our spare bedroom (not sure how they ended up there). So while it is very satisfying to finally finish my show-off scarf after so many years … there’s always more where it came from. Such is life.

And just because I don’t think I’ve shown it here, and I love it, here is Abby’s mobile. The pug pattern is from Danger Crafts on Etsy and the bone pattern from Kris Knits.