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. Both are 72 inches / 183 cm long.

• Trapezoid is 7 inches / 18 cm wide and uses 200 yards / 183 m of yarn.
• Triangle is 9 inches / 23 cm wide and uses 220 yards / 201 m of yarn.

This pattern includes complete written instructions and charts for both shapes, divided into three sections each: an increase wedge, a center rectangle (Trapezoid) or peak (Triangle), and a decrease wedge.