The tiniest of scarves

I couldn't just let my handspun sit there. I had to do something with it. It is VERY scratchy, and is making my hand eczema flare like nobody's business. (Did I never mention the eczema? Had it for years, went into remission for as long, then came back with a lovely friend for my knitting hand. I suspect I don't react well to cotton (?) and lanolin.) So this made the option of fingerless mitts a torture devise. Home items, such as a satchel were possible, however partially due to the eczema, I am not a fan of scenting anything. *

So a scarf it was. Being the math master that I am (sarcasm is one of my favorite flavors of humor to employ. As is mixing metaphors.) I tried to figure out how long I could conceivably make it. Watch as logic slowly gets twisted to my reality of how things should be. The longest I could make it would be 97 yards, meaning a string of yarn wrapped about my neck. If I divided it in half, it would be two strings wide, and 48.5 yards long. Now if I turned it on it's side, making it 48.5 yards WIDE, I could begin to fold the yarn upon itself making it narrower and narrower,, but longer and longer. SO, if I wanted a 5 foot long scarf, (97 yards x 3 ft/yd= 220 ft; 220ft/5ft= 4.4ft) I would need to use 4 feet a repeat.

Do you see the problems?

First off, dividing a piece of yarn in half does reduce the length, and make it twice as wide, but the width is increased by the width of A SINGLE PLY! Did I measure that? No, so all of my math was completely arbitrary. Second, notice the last math step? 220ft/5ft=4.4ft. I obviously didn't write any of this down before hand, because as any fourth grader can tell you, when you are dividing with lengths, the length is canceled out. ft/ft= no ft! And it's wrong!! I didn't hit the 0 on my computer calculator. (Twice I might add, because I do always check my numbers. But apparently never the logic.)

So how did I find out my 97 yards was becoming a 20 inch scarf? I started knitting, noticed how slowly it was growing, measured it, frogged it to see how much yarn I had used and did some GOOD calculations. In the end, what did I do? I swatched. All that math, All the fiddling with the concrete laws of mass conservation and what did I learn?

Swatching is there for a reason.

* As an aside to this, the husband visits friends once a week and when he returns I immediately make him take off his shirt. Am I just so filled with longing from his absence I am reduced to a frantic animal? No. He smells like the detergent they use, and I can't stand it! Detergent was the original trigger for my eczema and I didn't find out until I left for college. I now have a gut reaction to detergent smells. I almost always hug him when he gets home (if I'm knitting then he has to wait until I finish the row), and every Wednesday I hug him, then forcefully push him away. Mixed message sent, I make a disguised face and demand the removal of the offending shirt before it sinks into his skin. I have a more sensitive nose than he, so he never notices.