Tunisian not-so-simple stitch scarf

Sometime early in 2013, I was feeling pretty confident in my Tunisian skills, particularly in being able to wrangle novelty yarns that had previously proven difficult to crochet.  With that confidence, I started up a scarf using the contrast of a multi-textured gray yarn and an electric blue eyelash yarn.

The project idea was relatively simple: create a scarf with the dimensions of a typical fashion scarf using nothing but Tss, allowing the stripes to create the pattern.  The initial plan was to alternate a row of gray with two rows of blue.  Because the blue was so thin, the extra row brought it to a more consistent height with its gray friend.

From vision to reality

Oh hey, guess what.  Turns out thin eyelash yarn is a major pain to work with on its own.  Working into the second row was nearly impossible.  First, the color combined with the texture made seeing the vertical bar incredibly difficult - something that Tunisian tended to transcend with other novelty yarns.  The other issue was that the eyelashes loved to grip to themselves.  So not only would the vertical bar in front not separate from its friend in the back, the rows would just collapse on themselves and become indistinguishable.

This problem was somewhat overcome by taking the pattern a step further.  Instead of 1 gray row, 2 blue rows all the way, the pattern became 1 gray, 1 blue, 1 gray, 2 blue.  Spacing out the difficult rows made the project much more tolerable.

That didn't stop this thing from having its hiccups and mishaps.  About a year into picking it up and putting it down, I realized that my initial width was dwindling quickly, perhaps due mostly to my unwillingness to count the stitches.  My ego loves doing the, "I don't lose stitches.  Why on earth would I count?!"  But when all of a sudden I'd lost over 20 stitches halfway through the project, I admitted the need to rip back the painstaking rows of intense focus and frustration.

After a while, I made it my 2014 goal to finish this scarf.  And finished meant getting as close as possible to the initial measurements I was hoping to achieve, which basically meant targeting 60" of scarf.

Finally, this afternoon, I realized I had hit my target.  I don't think I've ever bound something off and woven in the ends so quickly.  Surprisingly enough, I only had tails at the beginning and end - I managed to work with no more than one wound ball of each yarn the entire project, despite the amount of fabric it ended up creating.

But the result is what I genuinely wanted.  It's admittedly littered with mistakes, and you can kind of tell that one end is wider than the other (I didn't want to rip back the whole thing).  However, it created a fairly lightweight scarf that is visually interesting and really brings out the best qualities of both yarns.

I'm just happy I actually completed a UFO!!