The Ballad of Hufflescarff

Today I am sharing The Ballad of Hufflescarff. Okay, so it's not really a "ballad," but you can sing along as you read if you want to. Instead of posting weekly updates of this project, I decided to write weekly updates, but not post them up until I was finished. So, no cliffhangers. Here is The Ballad of Hufflescarff, in its entirety. (If you do end up humming along, be sure to let me know to what tune.)

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Friday, July 19, 2013

Hufflescarff begins!

I began Hufflescarff on Monday (July 15th, 2013), and it is meant for a friend of mine, who is a respected Hufflepuff. (If you want to pretend that we attended Hogwarts at the same time, that’s cool with me.)

I’ve been working with plarn so much lately (in my numerous Bag the Bag projects) that I was ready to work with yarn again. Also my mother is a crocheter and gives me endless grief about the way I crochet, which is as tightly as possible, a holdover from my necklace making days. She seems to think that when I am “an adult,” I will “crochet loosely like a normal person, and drink coffee.” (The coffee thing’s not going to happen.)

I wanted to do something other than a single crochet (which is all I’ve been doing recently), and planned to experiment with not pulling the yarn as hard as I possibly could. I’ve got black yarn and some that is a lovely soft yellow color, so I sat down with a size K crochet hook and got to work.

The thing about a double crochet as opposed to a single crochet is that it works up so much faster (twice as fast, you might say). I’m still using a single crochet for the black stripes and the yellow one in between, but that’s mostly because I’m scared that the ends that I’m weaving in as I crochet would come out way more easily with a double than a single, and I know that a single crochet is more sturdy for that kind of thing.

I kind of rotated on and off with Bag the Bag Part 2: the Electric Boogaloo and Hufflescarff this week, because I wanted to work on both at the same time, but I haven’t figured out how to crochet with my feet yet.

Hufflescarff beside my Ravenscarf, which I made for myself in 2010 after a rigorous
process of taking random quizzes on the internet to determine what house I was in.
Ravenscarf is folded twice in this picture, and I want Hufflescarff to be at least as long
as Ravenscarf, so that means that Hufflescarff is about 1/4 of the way done.

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Friday, July 26, 2013

Hufflescarff Continues!

I feel like I haven’t worked much on Hufflescarff this week, but then I took pictures of it, and it seems that I’ve worked on it just as much as I did last week, because it’s about halfway done.

The only thing worrying me this week about it is that I’m going to run out of yarn. I haven’t worked with yarn (or a double crochet) in so long that I forgot about how quickly you use it up. The color is so pretty, but whenever I buy yarn I never know how much I’m really going to like something, so I usually only buy one skein. Then when I find out I do like it, I go back to the craft store and find out it’s discontinued. This is a true fact in the crafting world. The other side of this coin is when you go to the craft store and buy a huge bag of one kind of yarn, and then find out that you hate working with it or the color is completely wrong, and then you have a huge bag of yarn that you hate or can’t use.

I’m going to guess that I’ll get about ¾ of the way through this scarf when I run out of this gorgeous yellow yarn. Then I will cry. Then I will go to the craft store and there will be more, but I won’t be able to find it at first, so I’ll walk up and down the aisles whining that I can’t find it and refusing the help of any store employees. Those are my predictions.

But let’s hope they don’t come true and that this yarn lasts until Hufflescarff is completed!

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August 2, 2013

Hufflescarff stalls!

I hit a snag with Hufflescarff this week. Well, not a snag. That implies something that can be worked out. This snag required me to go to the yarn store and get more materials.

As soon as I got some more, I got back to work, but I wasn’t able to get as much done as I would have liked. Not quite ¾ of the way there, but just about. I could be done with the scarf next week if I work hard.

Then I’ll start freaking out about how to make tassels...

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August 9, 2013

Yay, Hufflescarff!

Hufflescarff is the best project for working on when I’m distracted by something else. When I’m working on it while reading or watching something, I’m always surprised at how far I’ve gotten when I look down at it. “Oh, time for stripes already?”

I’m definitely going to have to start another similar project when I’m done with this one. It’s too fun.

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August 23, 2013

Hufflescarff is nearing its end!

I am almost done. Every time I measure this thing I think, “Okay, I’ll finish the yellow bit I’m on now, and then one more set of black stripes and another yellow bit and I’ll be done!” This has been true the last couple of times I’ve measured it.

I AM SCARED OF TASSELS, BUT I THINK IT WILL NEED TASSELS; WHATEVER SHALL I DO

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October 22, 2013

HUFFLESCARFF IS COMPLETE

Sometimes one needs to be nudged while working on a project. Hufflescarff had been sitting (out of sight, out of mind) on a box behind the couch minding its own business for (apparently) two months. My aunt decided that my grandmother needed some nudging on a project that someone else began years ago. She asked if I had any black yarn to put some knitted squares together into a throw, so I grabbed the whole Hufflescarff project and took it along.

This turned out to be the best thing for Hufflescarff, because I decided to finish it while waiting for my aunt to knit another square, and when I was done, she taught me how to do the tassels. I didn’t do all of them exactly the same. Some have more yellow, some more black, and there’s a mix of the two all the way across.

It’s so cute! Now I have to find some way to get it to the Hufflepuff in question. I hope she likes it!