Favorite Things Friday - Crocheted Scarf....

I've been wrestling with this concept of "favorite." Does the word imply permanence? Longevity at least? I mean, my favorite color is yellow and has been since I was about 14 or 15 years old. I can remember the book I was reading (the heroine wore a luminous yellow ballgown, and I was hooked), and it was almost a conscious decision, "My favorite color is going to be yellow."

Favorites can change, though.....can't they? That very idea got me in sort of trouble with my credit card not too long ago. My credit card company changed my account number and canceled my old one, so I was trying to deactivate the canceled one from my online sign-in. Then I got to the secret question. "Who is your favorite athlete?"

Wait...what?

When did you ask me that? Because the answer to that secret question is highly dependent upon which SEASON we were in. Heck, what YEAR did you ask it?

If you asked it during football season, the answer might have been Matthew Stafford. Unless it was that first year he was at Detroit, when he spent the whole year on the injured reserve list, and was nothing much to write home about. It may have been Aaron Murray, although until this year he didn't impress me enough to warrant a "favorite" label.

If it was gymnastics season, it might have been Courtney Kupets. Or Kat Ding, if it wasn't right after one of the five times IN A ROW that she fell off the balance beam. (But she more than made up for it on the uneven bars.)

If it was baseball season, it might have been Brian McCann. Or Jeff Francoeur (if it was more than a couple of years ago).

Or I might have thought more in a historical sense and chosen Hershel Walker.

Whoever was my favorite whenever I answered that question, I failed at guessing three times in a row and the credit card company locked my online account.

Buttheads. What stupid kind of question is "Who is your favorite athlete?"

I realize that so far I haven't even touched on the subject of tonight's blog post.

My favorite thing tonight is a crochet pattern, and it became my favorite...yesterday.

That's Hubby serving as my model.

I wish I had taken the time to take better pictures while I still had decent daylight. Since this picture was taken I have added fringe on either end of the scarf.

It's also a darker blue than the photo indicates.

I don't think I've ever had a pattern that came together so effortlessly and took shape so beautifully. (I may break my arm off patting myself on the back.) It looks like it has a border, but it doesn't - that was just how it came together. I love the cable-like design. I'm just in love with this scarf, if it's okay in a not-very-creepy way to be in love with an inanimate object.

Here is a close-up of the pattern, but it's still not a very good view.

My very, very, very favorite thing about this crochet pattern, though, is the fact that...

...I made it up.

I've never had much success at creating my own patterns. To be honest, I didn't COMPLETELY make this one up. I started a scarf for which I had PAID TO DOWNLOAD the instructions, only to learn that I'm not the intermediate crocheter I thought I was.

I could understand SOME of the instructions. I can ch with the best of them, I understand sc, and I know hdc. I could even figure out ch2lp (chain 2 loop, although I thought it was chain 21 p's). But then I got to bpdc (see stitches - YO, insert hook from front to back to front again around post of st indicated and pull up a lp, [yo and draw through 2 lps on hook] 2 times).

Huh? Okay, let me try that...

Then I got to a dbl-CHSPC, which was a paragraph long in explanation and had embedded WITHIN it a fptr, and I gave up.

In anger, I just kept doing the two stitches I understood, got to the end of the row and turned, repeated the two stitches in the same pattern ...

And by golly, it worked. It might not look like the "professional" one on the bottom left of the picture here, but it's pretty. And functional. And required almost no curse words.

That's enough right there to make it my favorite. Hubby even asked me to make one for him. That's high praise coming from him. And he wasn't even kissing up. I don't think...