Several years ago when they were in middle school or beginning high school, I gave Mother’s needlepoint yarn, canvas and other crafting stuff to my granddaughter Kimberly and her friend (my borrowed granddaughter) Shannon. With the yarn, I gave them encouragement to Make Something Creative. And they did. Over the next several years, they made lots of things.
But when the girls graduated, got jobs, moved into their own apartment and began to look toward higher education – you guessed it – the leftover yarn and all the other leftover “stuff” came back to me.
I was on the verge of pitching out the large bag of vibrant color, but then I asked my sister’s advice. Practical as ever, Ruthie, the master weaver, said, “Never throw yarn away! Weave a scarf.” 
As it happens, I had some hanks of nice soft gray yarn I wasn’t too sure what to do with, and when I put them with the color, I began to picture a completed project.
Needlepoint yarn usually is cut into handy lengths for those who use it. Even though the yarn I used for red stripes was the longest in of all the yarns in the bag, the longest pieces proved to be too short to make a warp of the required length. So, I had to make extensions. (For you non-weavers, the extensions were in the “loom waste” section of the warp.) Making extensions wasn’t difficult to do, and the doing of it added to my meager library of weaving experience.
Without enough of any one color, I had to combine all the shades of my chosen color in order to make the scarf. Short supply of short scraps forced me to be somewhat avant guard and make an asymmetrical design – sort of like, we’ll pile all the stripes on this end and make the other end plain. The thought in the back of my mind was, “If worst comes to worst and this is a total flop, the danged thing could find its way into the doggie bed.”
In the end, however, I loved the design. Loosely woven, the wool, strip measured seven feet long, then shrunk to six feet in length after being washed and “fulled”. (This is not counting a good four inches of fringe on each end.) After the washing, the tag ends of yarn were cut and the fringe trimmed. The lovely thing was steam pressed, hung up to dry thoroughly, and ultimately was photographed.
Freshly showered and dressed in my favorite outfit, I stood before the full length mirror, and with great anticipation, flung the scarf around my neck. My first reaction after a satisfied smile was, “Yikes!”
The gray yarn was indeed soft, but the needlepoint yarn was the prickliest yarn I have ever wound around my own neck. So, I found another use for the scarf fabric. This piece will not find its way to the doggie bed.
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