Back on Halloween, my boyfriend and I went to a concert (Rodrigo y Gabriela, fantastic show). As we were getting ready to leave, Josh had a moment of panic when he couldn’t find his scarf. It was located eventually in the sleeve of his coat, but before it was found I had told him that if it was lost for good, I would make him another one. The idea stuck, and I went to work looking for a pattern. Something masculine, with yarn and colors that would suit him. I found the perfect pattern on knitty with the Danica scarf, using Cascade 220 wool.

A few weeks later, I was in Colorado for a conference, and used a lot of our downtime to finish up Danica. It was also a great conversation starter; potential customers would stop at our booth to ooh and ahh over my knitting, and my co-worker would take the opportunity to work her sales magic on them. 😉 The people who were most impressed with the scarf were the men, which I took as a good sign since I was making it for a man. (When they all found out I was making it for my boyfriend, the reaction was the same: “If he doesn’t appreciate that, dump him!”)

It was a while after I finished knitting the scarf that I actually got around to blocking it:

Due to the limited amount of space in my tiny flat, it was blocked on my bed. I probably could have done it on the floor, but… anyway. I didn’t soak the thing, so I laid it out on the bed in the morning and it was mostly dry by the evening. I also took the hair dryer to it for some final drying. Since Josh spent Christmas in Oregon with his family, we exchanged gifts early, and I got to show him his gift while it was blocking. His initial reaction was what you would expect (“Oh, nice!”) but as he started to really look at it, he kept turning it over, trying to figure out how it had been done. Magic! Or, something like that. 😉