Tilting at Windmills Scarves

More than four hundred years ago, Miguel Cervantes wrote that his character Don Quixote came to a plain full of windmills and, imagining them to be hulking giants, exclaimed that he would slay them and take their riches. Over the centuries, the phrase “tilting (jousting) at windmills” has come to mean fighting an imaginary enemy.

Finding a pattern that only uses the yarn you have can be frustrating, but yarn shouldn’t feel like the enemy. With that in mind, I set out to design the longest, widest, most practical, and appealing scarves I could from one skein of worsted weight yarn. The results are two shapes of Tilting at Windmills Scarves.

Techniques:

• purl through the back loop (p1tbl)

• knit two stitches together (k2tog)

• slip-slip-knit decrease (ssk)

• yarnover (yo)

• knit front and back in the same stitch (kfb)

Gauge: 9 stitches and 18 rows garter st = 2 in / 5 cm