Alpaca is for lovers

Short post today as I spent most of Saturday in the pub (mmm, Guinness) and Sunday finishing (tah dah!) the giant alpaca scarf for the boyfriend:

To give an idea of scale, that's it taking up our entire dining table, seats 4-6.

It is enormous, probably the heaviest scarf I have ever laid eyes upon, let alone knit. It took seven skeins of Blue Sky Alpacas Bulky Naturals (three of the cream, two each of the caramel and dark brown), so weighs a whopping 700g (that's 1.5lb, imperial fans). It is currently 10 feet long, but will probably stretch out a fair bit over time. Tech details: 2x2 rib over 20 stitches on 12mm needles. 

This is all because my darling one likes to wear his scarf folded in half lengthwise then with the ends pulled through the middle (that probably doesn't describe it well) so it has to be very long to suit his tastes. This led to repeated requests by me as to whether I could cast off, each time to be asked for "just one more pattern repeat". The knot, as he wears it, is almost bigger than his head. He certainly won't be getting cold.  And he loves it, which is the main thing.  

I hadn't realised until now just how dense alpaca is - I'd assumed, naively, that once you'd reached a certain level of bulkiness, that was about it, and so I merrily assumed that the BSA would be roughly 100m/100g like Rowan Big Wool (his poor lost scarf took 400g of Big Wool to achieve the desired length, in the same rib pattern). Why I didn't look properly at the ball band when I bought the first lot of this a year ago, I don't know. Turns out this stuff is over twice as heavy, at only 45m/100g, hence the scarf that may actually generate some kind of alpaca-fuzzy black hole here in north London under its own mass. I won't even mention how much it cost in yarn - but those who wish to calcuate may note that I made repeated trips for materials to Loop.

If he loses this one any time soon, I will kill him.