Scarf in the City

As I've no doubt whinged before, it's very difficult to produce finished objects midweek in winter, especially if you have to give them to the recipient before the weekend. No chance of photographing them well outside working hours when the mornings and evenings are so dark. I therefore had to take A's finished scarf to work today, and get myself inventive in the park at lunchtime.

I started by looking for a suitable model amongst the denizens of the park...

Achilles, who certainly looked a bit chilly with no clothes on, was far too big. The scarf would barely have gone around his thick bronze neck, even though it is ribbed Rowan Big Wool.

This bedraggled city pigeon (Columba livia) was all huddled up and in need of a cosy scarf, and the blue and grey would have complemented its feathers nicely. But it was far too small, and decidedly wary of the madwoman trying to take pictures of knitwear.

The lion and the unicorn on the park gates looked to be about the right size, but were pretty much inaccessible on a traffic island. I was not going to get run over for the sake of this.

So I considered a more plant-based model. I've seen an awful lot of blog and Ravelry photos of knitwear and yarn "in the wild" and they always confuse me slightly. I mean, what's the thinking behind them? Knitwear doesn't live in the garden. Yarn rarely goes outside (all of mine is perfectly house trained). Those photos always make me think the photographer has temporarily mislaid their fibre arts, as in, "Where the hell did I put that beautiful lace shawl? Oh yes, there it is, on that shrub! Naughty lace! And where's my skein of handdyed sock yarn? I know, I'll look over there, it's probably posing in the flowerbed." Apologies to readers who are, ahem, guilty of this sort of thing.

But I decided to give it a go. I found one of the capital's more numerous residents, the mighty London Plane (Platanus acerifolia). These were planted in large numbers, according to the boyfriend who is studying such things, at the time when London's streets were first being paved during the Industrial Revolution. This is because the bark is constantly flaking off in characteristic chequerboard scales, leaving nice clean non-sooty patches underneath. Here is the scarf demonstrating this feature:

And more perilously (it was quite windy), hanging out in the branches:

By this point I felt more than a little silly, so I went for a final, maudlin photo, a lonely scarf forgotten and abandoned on a park bench:

All together now, aaaaahhh.

It's now on its way to A, to accompany him as he throws himself down snowy mountains. Good luck little scarf, god speed!