Patchwork Mouse

Finished the scarf I was making. It's gorgeous yarn, very soft and plushy--really faux fur around a thread-like core. (Sort of like eyelash yarn, except the fuzz is shorter and goes all the way around.) Two colors, a heathery gray/white/black and a vanilla-ish white. It's very hard to work with, though; it doesn't have the give that the other yarns have, and the fur has a lot of friction. If I'd known how tough it was going to be to knit, I never would have bought it. But it is very pretty. And very, very soft.

The scarf has three vertical stripes--wider strips of the gray flanking a thin strip of the white. The original plan was to have each stripe the same width, but the stitches turned out much wider than anticipated; the gauge is smaller (11 instead of 13) and so are the needles, so I thought it would be narrower. Wrong. I should have swatched it, I suppose. Intarsia wasn't working for me (partly because of the yarn, I think) so I cheated: I made long thin strips of each color, then wove them together with more of the white yarn. It works.

It's a Boxing Day present.